Nina Otero's Old Spain in Our Southwest (1936) represents one of the early regional literary responses to Anglo-American economic and sociopolitical domination in New Mexico. A compilation of folkloric vignettes, the work reflects the effort of New Mexican women, originally from a landed gentry, on behalf of their cultural heritage. Similar to the writings of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca and Cleofas Jaramillo, Ortero's nostalgic, romanticized narratives praise a utopian Spanish heritage and lament a vanishing way of life. At the same time that these women claim authority through authorship over an irretrievable past, they also bear witness to a present of forced cultural assimilation.

Maria Adelina Isabel Emilia (Nina) Otero was born on 23 October 1881 in La Constancia, New Mexico, along the Río Grande some twenty miles south of Albuquerque. According to Charlotte Whaley, her biographer, Otero's was a distinguished family that traced its origins back to eleventh-century...