Fiesta Fare — cover by Al Momaday, 1956

What this book is

Albuquerque was founded in April 1706 by Spanish colonists under the orders of Francisco Cuervo y Valdés and named for the Duke of Alburquerque, viceroy of New Spain. In 1956 the city celebrated its 250th anniversary, and the civic-organization circuit produced a wave of small commemorative items: cookbooks, programs, dance brochures, dinner-menu booklets. Most are forgotten now. Fiesta Fare is one of them — a slim recipe collection for "Mexican, Spanish and Southwestern" home cooking, of the sort that an Albuquerque civic group of the era would have assembled by collecting recipes from members and printing them locally on a saddle-stitched binder.

The contents are functionally similar to dozens of other regional Southwest cookbooks of the period. Posole, sopaipillas, calabacitas, the chile rellenos recipe of an aunt, the variations on enchiladas and tortillas. None of that is what makes this book significant.

The cover is what makes it significant.

Why it matters

The signature in the lower right reads Al Momaday. That is Alfred Morris Momaday — Kiowa artist, art teacher, and director of the Jemez Day School in Jemez Pueblo. He was a respected Native American painter and illustrator in the postwar Southwest, exhibited in regional museums, and designed the cover here at age 43 in 1956.

Twelve years later, in 1968, his son N. Scott Momaday published House Made of Dawn, a novel set in part on Jemez Pueblo where Al taught and Scott had grown up. It won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. N. Scott Momaday is widely credited with launching the Native American Renaissance in literature; he died in February 2024. NMLP maintains a pillar guide on his first editions and lists him on the closed signature pool page because his signed books are now a finite, authenticatable corpus.

So the cover of this small cookbook is, by lineage, a piece of Momaday-family history. It is the kind of object that a UNM American Studies graduate student or a Smithsonian curator would flag immediately on sight. It is also the kind of object that a non-collector would walk past without a second thought, because the book itself looks like any other 1950s civic cookbook.

The combination — a triple-collectible (regional 250th-anniversary ephemera, Native American art history, Momaday-family provenance) hidden inside a forgettable-looking civic recipe collection — is exactly the kind of object the donation archive exists to document.

How it came in

An Albuquerque-area donor who'd been told by a library Friends sale to sort "the good ones" first — he didn't know which were good — called NMLP for a free pickup of his entire pile. The cookbook was sitting in the same box as a 1990 Triple-A road atlas and several mass-market paperbacks. The full donor story is told in "The Library Wouldn't Take His Books Without Sorting."

Where it's going

I'm holding this one back from immediate routing. A 1956 commemorative cookbook with a Momaday-signed cover is the kind of object that deserves proper documentation, photography, and a careful next home — ideally a UNM special-collections librarian, a Momaday scholar, or a NM museum-quality regional ephemera archive. I've reached out to the obvious local custodians. The book stays at the warehouse, climate-controlled and away from sunlight, until I have a destination that will actually treat it as the object it is.

If you're a UNM American Studies, Native American Studies, or Special Collections faculty member or graduate student and you'd like to look at it in person before it's placed, call or text 702-496-4214.