Selling Cleofas Jaramillo Books in Albuquerque: The Folklorist Who Fought to Keep New Mexico’s Memory
By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · · ~1,750 words
Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred, who has bought and sorted northern New Mexico estate libraries for a decade.
Cleofas Martínez Jaramillo (1878–1956) wrote some of the most important New Mexico books that almost no estate sale knows to look for. An Arroyo Hondo daughter of one of the village’s founding families, she lost her husband and all three of her children — one daughter to murder — and turned her grief into a one-woman campaign to keep nuevomexicano culture from disappearing. Her memoir Romance of a Little Village Girl (1955) is now called a classic of Southwest literature, and her folklore and recipe books are foundational. For collectors and estate executors, her name is one of the great quiet finds in a New Mexico library. Here is what matters and why.
The folklorist of Arroyo Hondo
Jaramillo was born in 1878 in Arroyo Hondo, in Taos County, one of seven children of a family descended from the village’s first settlers. Convent-schooled in Taos and Santa Fe, she married her cousin, the businessman and state legislator Venceslao Jaramillo, and ran a sheep operation with him at El Rito before his death in 1920 left her to fight for her own inheritance while raising their one surviving child, Angelina. In 1931 Angelina was murdered in their Santa Fe home — the last of a chain of losses Jaramillo later described as destiny “bent on crushing me down to the very last of my endurance.” A strong-willed businesswoman, she rebuilt, and she wrote.
Her writing had a mission: like other nuevomexicano folklorists of her generation, she believed the Hispanic culture of New Mexico was being eroded — by assimilation and by outsiders whose romanticizing she resented as a misunderstanding of the real thing. In 1935 she co-founded La Sociedad Folklórica de Santa Fe (with Aurora Lucero-White Lea), an organization devoted to authentically preserving the Spanish language, customs, and traditions of the region. The feminist critic Tey Diana Rebolledo placed Jaramillo with Fabiola Cabeza de Baca and Adelina Otero-Warren as the trio of nuevomexicana writers “remarkable for their concerns and their production” in an era when few Hispanas had the education, leisure, or encouragement to write — women who recorded the domestic details male narratives left out. Jaramillo died in El Paso in 1956.
Clearing a northern New Mexico estate — Taos, Arroyo Hondo, Santa Fe, the Rio Arriba villages — and finding old Spanish-language folklore or recipe books, or a memoir of village girlhood? Jaramillo is the name to know. Text a photo of the covers and title pages to 702-496-4214 and I’ll tell you honestly what you have.
The four books
Jaramillo published four books, all of them scarce. In 1939 she brought out two at once: The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes (Potajes Sabrosos), a collection of the old village recipes, and Cuentos del Hogar (also issued as Spanish Fairy Tales), her gathering of the Spanish folk stories she had grown up hearing. In 1941 came Shadows of the Past (Sombras del Pasado), a portrait of the folklore and daily life of Arroyo Hondo in the 1870s and 1880s. And in 1955, the year before her death, she published her masterwork, Romance of a Little Village Girl — an autobiography of customs, faith, and a vanishing way of life, written in English (a language she found difficult) precisely so it would reach as wide a readership as possible. It is the book that secured her standing as a classic Southwest writer.
First-edition identification
These were small-press and regional-press books in modest print runs, so the originals are genuinely uncommon and identification rests on a few essentials:
- Match the title to its year. The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes and Cuentos del Hogar are 1939; Shadows of the Past is 1941; Romance of a Little Village Girl is 1955. An original printing carries its period imprint and date on the title and copyright pages.
- Originals versus modern reissues. Both The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes and Romance of a Little Village Girl have been reissued in modern scholarly and facsimile editions, which are valuable as reading and reference editions but are not the period firsts. Check the copyright page for a later reissue date and a modern publisher before assuming you have an original.
- Condition and completeness. Because the recipe and folklore books were used, an original in a jacket or original wrappers, complete and unmarked, is the collectible object; a worn, marked, or rebound copy is a reading copy.
Signed or inscribed Jaramillo is scarce and prized. Given how few originals exist, even a clean unsigned first of any of the four is a find.
The collector market — three tiers
Tier 1 — trophy: an original 1955 first of Romance of a Little Village Girl; an original 1939 Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes; and any signed or inscribed copy of any title.
Tier 2 — collector: originals of Cuentos del Hogar (1939) and Shadows of the Past (1941); and the better modern facsimile and scholarly editions of the two best-known titles.
Tier 3 — reading copies: later paperback reissues and worn kitchen copies of the recipe book. These keep Jaramillo readable and are the copies that do the most good donated back into New Mexico classrooms and libraries.
Where she turns up — and how NMLP handles her
Jaramillo’s books cluster in the northern villages and the Santa Fe–Taos cultural world she worked to preserve: estates in Arroyo Hondo, El Rito, Taos, and Santa Fe; the libraries of folklorists, teachers, and old Hispano families; and the shelves of collectors who care about the nuevomexicana writers. Because the originals are scarce and the modern reissues common, the two are easy to confuse — which is exactly why an original first can slip out of a hurried cleanout unnoticed.
When her books come through a New Mexico Literacy Project pickup, the handling is the same as for any collectible New Mexico author: originals, jacketed or original-wrapper firsts, and signed copies are identified by hand and routed to specialist dealers or kept for the regional record rather than bulk-sorted; clean reissues go through careful resale; and reading copies go back to New Mexico readers. Nothing readable is landfilled. If you are clearing a northern New Mexico home and an old Spanish-language book makes you pause, that pause is worth a text.
External References
- Wikipedia: Cleofas Jaramillo — life, the Folklore Society, and bibliography.
- Cleofas Martínez Jaramillo, New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program.
- Cleofas Martínez Jaramillo, Notable Folklorists of Color (American Folklore Society).
- Rebolledo, Tey Diana. “Las Escritoras: Romances and Realities,” in Pasó por Aquí (University of New Mexico Press, 1989).
Related on This Site
- Fabiola Cabeza de Baca — her fellow nuevomexicana writer and preservationist of New Mexico foodways.
- Collecting New Mexico Cookbooks — where her Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes belongs in the tradition.
- Eugene Manlove Rhodes — whose Pasó por Aquí gave its name to the scholarly series that recovered Jaramillo.
- The New Mexico Literary Atlas — where Arroyo Hondo and Taos sit in the state’s literary geography.
Cite This Guide
Eldred, J. (May 2026). Selling Cleofas Jaramillo Books in Albuquerque: The Folklorist Who Fought to Keep New Mexico’s Memory. New Mexico Literacy Project. https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/selling-cleofas-jaramillo-books-albuquerque — original research by Josh Eldred, licensed CC BY 4.0. Cite with attribution.
Have her books — or a whole New Mexico library?
I buy and evaluate New Mexico estate libraries across the Albuquerque–Santa Fe–Taos corridor and the northern counties, and I give an honest read on what’s worth what — or I’ll pick the whole collection up free if you’d rather donate it. Either way, the good books find readers.
Call or Text 702-496-4214