María Magdalena Gallegos's life is an example of the change in the world of the Chicana from being primarily a daughter, wife, and mother to being in the vanguard of the social, business, and intellectual communities. She was brought up in the traditional neighborhood of Auraria in Denver, Colorado. Her articles on Auraria, published in 1985 and 1990, and Auraria Remembered, an oral-history collection she edited in 1991, address that way of life and its destruction by a governmental decision to raze the neighborhood in the early 1970s and allocate the land to the Auraria Higher Education Center so that it could build a campus for three schools: the Community College of Denver, the Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the University of Colorado at Denver. The desire to preserve the folklore and the collective memory of the customs and traditions of her community has led Gallegos to exercise...