Volume 7, Issue 2 (Spring 1998)

From the Editor's Desk

Four hundred years ago in 1598, Juan de Oñate led a caravan of settlers northward from Santa Bárbara, in present-day Chihuahua, Mexico, beyond the Río Grande to northern New Mexico. There Oñate and the settlers established New Mexico's first capital at San Juan de los Caballeros. Given the sensitivities of the 1990s and the attendant "political correctness" that has keynoted this decade in the United States, the commemoration of Oñate's entrada has met with controversy as the popular mind subjected its twentieth-century-based notions of justice on a historical conquest that occurred across time in another culture. The articles contained in this volume of the Colonial Latin American Historical Review are about Juan de Oñate and his times. The introductory essay by Joseph P. Sánchez provides the historical context for the rest of the articles. Alfredo Jiménez offers perspectives on the imperial world in which Oñate lived. Donald T. Garate examines Oñate's genealogy and services to the Crown through the lens of Oñate's 1625 prueba de caballero and petition to become a member of the Order of Santiago. José Antonio Esquibel attempts to link Oñate's ancestry to his probable Jewish-converso background. Finally, María Luisa Pérez-González focuses on the history and development of caminos reales in addressing the significance of the camino de Oñate in the history of New Mexico and New Spain.