Benito's Bizcochitos is a story that conveys warmth, personal history and tradition. While it contains adventure, it does so with a veil of magical safety. It is a refreshing change from the all too often violence ridden and scary material available for even the youngest of children.

This book is highly recommended for engaging children in a discussion of their own culture, the traditions of other cultures, and/or their personal family histories. The story is delightfully illustrated and is further enhanced by the interactive tool of a hands on baking activity.

It may appear odd that there has been no synthetc history of Hispanics in Colorado, a state with a large Spanish-surnamed population and a Spanish name. Part of the reason for this is that there are actually two Hispanic Colorados. One is in the southern part of the state, a place ecologically and culturally more a part of northern New Mexico than the mountain West. When the Colorado Territory was formed in 1859, surveyors simply drew a rectangle around Denver forming the future state from Kansas, Utah and New Mexico territories. As a consequence those New Mexicans, whose roots date back to eighteenth-century Spanish days and who had been settling the San Luis Valley since the early 1850s, found themselves part of Colorado. Then, as irrigation facilitated the rise of the sugar beet industry around Fort Collins and the South Platte Valley, more and more Mexicans migrated from the interior of Mexico to find jobs there. Beginning as a trickle around the turn of the century, thousands came to Colorado during World War I and the 1920s. While the New Mexican Coloradans who were displaced from ththeir lands often mingled with these recent arrivals in the agricultural fields, and mines and factories of Trinidad, Walsenburg and Pueblo, they understood themselve to be different from the new arrivals from Mexico. Indeed, the "Spanish Americans," as they increasingly called themselves, experienced little prejudice in Colorado until the larger numbers of Indo-Hispano Mexicans began to threaten the lily-white future of places like Denver and Fort Collins. By the 1920s, often barred from restaurants and hotels, the Spanish Americans, quite like German Jews disliking the more rustic Russian Jews and "lace Irish" recoiling at "shanty Irish," increasingly distanced themselves from their southern brethren whom they often blamed for bringing segregation and discrimination. (...)These issues of ongoing mestizaje, or mixing, of cultural dynamism, and the diversity of experiences, spiritualities and political perspectives should be central to future chronicles of Colorado Hispanics. While it may be that the Boulder/Aspen/Broncos lifestyles are associated with the glamour of our state, it is actually the hidden histories of Hispanics, workers, cow punchers, farm wives, community activists and all the rest of those concealed in history that give Colorado its special, and most meaningful past. -Doug Monroy, Professor of History and Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwestern Studies

I adore this slice of life on the eastern New Mexico plains, the Llano Estacado. Cabeza de Baca is an amazing lady, and her childhood remembrances are well worth reading for history buffs, who've probably already enjoyed it, as well as for people who just like to know how people lived on ranches in this era.