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Death and Dying in New Mexico. By Martina Will de Chaparro. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. xxiv, 261. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 cloth.
While death is the universal human act, how the dying experience that act is not. As such, Martina Will de Chaparro explores the adaptation of perceptions and rituals of death to the conditions of Spanish colonial, Mexican, and U.S. territorial New Mexico. Not seeking to challenge the established Iberian and colonial Spanish literature, the author takes a decidedly H. E. Bolton approach to death in New Mexico, declaring that scholars cannot understand the life of death in the United States without reaching beyond the pale of Puritanism. Protestant New England is not the history of the United States, she argues, and death in New Mexico "demonstrates that there was no single American way of death, and . . . challenges scholars to look beyond the Northeast" (p. xviii).
Will de Chaparro...