Rio Arriba – A New Mexico County

Rio Arriba
392 Pages
ISBN 9781890689650

Rio Arriba, A New Mexico County attempts to tell the long, complex, and fascinating history of the northern New Mexico region known as the rio arriba, or upper river. The authors provide an overview of the region's primordial beginnings that left us the remains of coelophysis, New Mexico official state fossil; introduces us to ten Tewa peoples that established the region's first permanent settlements and discusses the role the Navajo, Ute, and Jicarilla Apache played in the region's history.

As the history unfolds the reader learns of the Spanish conquistadores and later-arriving Americans, and their often contentious relations with the region's Native American peoples as well as the evolution of the geopolitical entity known as Rio Arriba County. The book was compiled by Rio Arriba native and former State Historian Robert J. Tórrez and Robert Trapp, long-time publisher of the Rio Grande Sun. Topics covered include land grants, agriculture, influence of the railroad, education, and the “wild west” in northern New Mexico. Chapters written by local historians provide histories on Chimayó, Abiquiú, Tierra Amarilla, Chama, Embudo/Dixon, Santa Cruz, and other historic communities in the region.

Robert J. Tórrez

About Robert J. Tórrez (Albuquerque, New Mexico Author)

Robert J. Tórrez

Robert J. Tórrez was born and raised in the northern New Mexico community of Los Ojos in Rio Arriba County. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas and served as the New Mexico State Historian from 1987 until his retirement in December 2000. For more than four decades he has mined the vast documentary treasures in our own Spanish, Mexican, and Territorial archives to find the “voices from the past” that have provided material for hundreds of stories that tell of New Mexico’s long and colorful history.

He has published five books, El Primer Siglo, UFOs Over Galisteo and Other Stories of New Mexico’s History; New Mexico in 1876-1877, A Newspaperman’s View; Myth of the Hanging Tree and Rio Arriba, A New Mexico County, and Voices From the Past, The Comanche Raid of 1776 and Other Tales of New Mexico History. Since 1992 he has written a monthly history column, “Voices From the Past,” for Round the Roundhouse. He has also published more than one hundred scholarly and popular articles in numerous regional and national publications and contributed to nearly two dozen books, including a recent New Mexico history textbook.