In the Nahua village of La Esperanza, nestled in Mexico’s Huasteca region of Veracruz, fewer than 200 residents navigate a compelling paradox: how to maintain deep cultural roots while embracing modernity. Humans, Saints, and Earth Beings is a rich and lively ethnography that reveals how this rural community achieves remarkable social cohesion through what Anath Ariel de Vidas terms “combinationism”—the deliberate integration of seemingly disparate ontological universes within a single cultural framework.

In her work, Ariel de Vidas demonstrates how villagers blend traditional earth-based rituals with Catholic practices, creating a sophisticated system of coexistence between humans and nonhuman entities. These ritual combinations serve as the primary mechanism for social production, cultural continuity, and political authority. The book challenges conventional anthropological binaries of tradition versus modernity and continuity versus acculturation through “thick” ethnographic descriptions that focus on the ethics of coexistence among humans themselves as well as between humans and the peculiar nonhuman inhabitants of their environment.
 
Originally published in Spanish as Combinar para convivir (2021), Humans, Saints, and Earth Beings contributes to contemporary theoretical discussions about Indigenous ontologies, ritual practice, and social cohesion. It offers crucial insights into how rural communities worldwide might navigate the tensions between maintaining cultural particularities and participating in broader social transformations, making it essential reading for anthropologists, Latin American studies scholars, and anyone interested in Indigenous resilience and adaptation.
 

Indians of the Rio Grande Delta is the first single-volume source on these little-known peoples. Working from innumerable primary documents in various Texan and Mexican archives, Martin Salinas has compiled data on more than six dozen named groups that inhabited the area in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Depending on available information, he reconstructs something of their history, geographical range and migrations, demography, language, and culture. He also offers general information on various unnamed groups of Indians, on the lifeways of the indigenous peoples, and on the relations between the Indian groups and the colonial Spanish missions in the region.

An English translation of Chapa's Historia de Nuevo León, the first history of the region that eventually became Texas and northeastern Mexico.

Winner, Presidio La Bahía Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas

In the seventeenth century, South Texas and Northeastern Mexico formed El Nuevo Reino de León, a frontier province of New Spain. In 1690, Juan Bautista Chapa penned a richly detailed history of Nuevo León for the years 1630 to 1690. Although his Historia de Nuevo León was not published until 1909, it has since been acclaimed as the key contemporary document for any historical study of Spanish colonial Texas.

This book offers the only accurate and annotated English translation of Chapa's Historia. In addition to the translation, William C. Foster also summarizes the Discourses of Alonso de León (the elder), which cover the years 1580 to 1649. In the appendix, Foster includes a translation of Alonso (the younger) de León's previously unpublished revised diary of the 1690 expedition to East Texas and an alphabetical listing of over 80 Indian tribes identified in this book.

Chapa was also an authority on the local Indians, and his Historia lists the names and locations of over 300 Indian tribes. This information, together with descriptions of the vegetation, wildlife, and climate in seventeenth-century Texas, make this book essential reading for ethnographers, anthropologists, and biogeographers, as well as students and scholars of Spanish borderlands history.