In the Country of Empty Crosses

“In the Country of Empty Crosses arrives as an event in the literary annals of America’s epic pageant of anathematized New World identities, prophetically remembered. Read it as the first ‘deep time’ testimonio of a Hispano protestante from old New Mexico to heed the call of his ancestors to tell their story, which is also his own, con corazón. Wrought with an often wry, flinty poetic eloquence, boundless compassion, and a geomancer’s attention to the austere mystical power of the landscapes of his Tierra Amarilla homeland, Madrid’s fearless tale gives us a glimpse into a secret world of untold histories and longings, narrated throughout with a generous heart, open to becoming something new. It is a bravura performance of ancestral imagination. ”— John Phillip Santos

“A moving remembrance of a Hispano Protestant family in Catholic New Mexico.”— Southwestern Historical Quarterly

“Poetic and powerful, it is a complex memoir of such northern New Mexico places as Tierra Amarilla, San Augustin and Los Fuertes that were once among the most remote in the nation.”— Albuquerque Arts

“This is a beautifully written and reverent history of a family and its homeland in northern New Mexico. Gentle, unsentimental, yet enormously moving, it shines with an elegiac radiance. Miguel Gandert’s spare photographs complement the prose perfectly.”— John Nichols

“An astutely observed, beautifully written new hybrid of history, family, and memory.”— San Antonio Express-News

“Blessings, benedictions, benificence to all things in the world, little and large. Arturo Madrid has given them each a name, and their names are chamizal, Teófilo, Tierra Amarilla. For the country of empty crosses is not empty at all. It is a story older than Plymouth Rock, a history history forgot.”— Sandra Cisneros