Archive entry · UNM Press first edition
Diego de Vargas — Letters from the New World (UNM Press, 1989)
A first-edition abridgment of the Vargas family correspondence drawn from the long-running Vargas Project at the University of New Mexico Press. Edited by John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge. The personal letters of the Spanish governor who reconquered New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 — translated and annotated for an English-reading audience.
Catalog
What this book is
Don Diego de Vargas (1643–1704) is the central figure in late-17th-century New Mexico history. Born into a Madrid noble family in financial decline, he came to New Spain in 1672 seeking the royal service that would restore the family fortune. He served as alcalde mayor in Tlalpujahua and then in Teutila, was appointed governor and captain general of New Mexico in 1688, and led the reconquest of the Pueblo lands following the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that had driven the Spanish out for thirteen years. He died at Bernalillo in 1704 while on campaign against Apache raiders, never having seen Spain again.
The Vargas family in Madrid preserved sixty-six personal letters that he wrote home to his children and son-in-law over the three decades he was away. Those letters sat in the family archive in Spain, unstudied, until the Vargas Project — a long-running scholarly initiative housed at the University of New Mexico Press — located them, transcribed them, translated them, and published them as part of an English-language scholarly edition of Vargas's complete papers. The principal full edition was published in 1989 as Remote Beyond Compare: Letters of don Diego de Vargas to His Family from New Spain and New Mexico, 1675–1706, also from UNM Press. The book in this archive entry is the abridged version drawn from that full edition for a wider readership — the 1989 first edition of Letters from the New World.
The letters illuminate the Vargas of the family rather than the Vargas of the campaign — a man writing to his children and son-in-law about his finances, his prospects, his loneliness, his sense of duty, his pursuit of promotion, his persistent attempts to settle debts in Madrid from a continent away. The annotations and the extended introductory essay by Kessell, Hendricks, and Dodge provide the surrounding historical context. The book's frontispieces and inserted plates include a reproduction of the title page of don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's Mercurio Volante (Mexico City, 1693), the contemporary Spanish-language pamphlet that reported Vargas's reconquest of New Mexico to a Mexico City readership.
Why this copy matters
For NM-history specialists, the Vargas Project is one of the most important scholarly projects on Spanish-colonial New Mexico produced in the last fifty years. The full edition (Remote Beyond Compare plus the multi-volume journals) is the standard primary source for the Vargas governorship and is held in major research libraries worldwide. The 1989 abridged Letters from the New World is the version that found its way into private New Mexico libraries and onto university course syllabi, because it's accessible to a non-specialist reader and because it focuses on the human side of a figure usually written about as a campaigner.
This copy is a clean first edition of the abridgment, with the cover calligraphy and design by Diana Stetson (a Santa Fe-based artist whose work appears on a number of UNM Press history titles from the late 1980s). No marginalia, no signature, but in solid resaleable condition for the right collector or library.
Multi-part bibliographic record
How it came in
Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy. Book in clean paperback condition with no marginalia or markings.
Where it's going
Likely route: a NM-history graduate student at UNM, a Spanish-colonial scholar elsewhere, or a private collector building a Vargas Project shelf. The 1989 abridgment is out of print as a new copy; clean used copies are findable but the right reader will pay for one.
External references & authoritative sources
- WorldCat / OCLC: search.worldcat.org/isbn/9780826313546 — library holdings worldwide.
- Publisher: University of New Mexico Press — the long-running scholarly publisher of the Vargas Project.
- The Vargas Project: UNM Department of History — where John L. Kessell directed the project for decades. Kessell’s 2008 book Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press) is the popular synthesis drawn from the project’s primary-source work.
- Diego de Vargas — biographical: Wikipedia; New Mexico Office of the State Historian.
- Sigüenza y Góngora’s Mercurio Volante (1693): reproduced in this volume by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
- Pueblo Revolt of 1680 & reconquest of 1692–96 — broader context: Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992).
- Reviewed in: Documentary Editing; New Mexico Historical Review.
Citation (Chicago): Eldred, Josh. "Letters from the New World — Vargas / Kessell (UNM Press, 1989)." NMLP Donation Archive. Albuquerque: New Mexico Literacy Project, May 2, 2026. https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/archive/letters-new-world-vargas-1989.
UNM Press regional history is the densest stratum of NM estate libraries.
If you're sorting a parent's or grandparent's NM-history shelf and the names Kessell, Simmons, Weber, Knaut, or Twitchell appear, the donation is most likely a serious scholarly library. Free in-home pickup catches the rare and out-of-print volumes that estate buyers miss.
Related on this site
- Back to the archive index
- Benavides Memorial (1630) — the foundational early-colonial document that pre-dates the Vargas era by sixty years.
- Reluctant Frontiersman (Larkin / Barbour, UNM Press 1990) — a Santa Fe Trail primary source two centuries later, also via UNM Press.
- Marc Simmons pillar — the popular NM-history scholarship that intersects with the Vargas Project's primary-source work.