The fear of her culture rapidly vanishing was what motivated Cleofas M. Jaramillo to write and to establish La Sociedad Folklórica de Santa Fe (The Folkloric Society of Santa Fe) in 1935. All her books, starting with her cookbook and her collection of folktales, both published in 1939, were a reaction to the fear of seeing her culture disappear. "My humble effort in writing this book is with the sole desire of preserving in writing our rapidly vanishing New Mexico Spanish folklore," Jaramillo stated in a handwritten note in a copy of Shadows of the Past (1941). She is especially conscious in her writing of the loss of Spanish and the use of English as her means of communicating the culture's disappearance. Consequently Jaramillo's work is nostalgic with romantic and religious overtones. What her books reflect are the concerns of an upper-class, Hispanic elite (the ricos) from a female...