Mas Antes: Voices from the Rio Puerco Valley

Noted folklorist Nasario Garcia has long devoted himself to preserving the folklore of his native Rio Puerco Valley, the rural area northwest of Albuquerque.

The places are abandoned today, but the richness of the valley's people and their folklore, intermingling with history, memory, and the tragedy and erosion of time, forms the heart of Garcia's Mas Antes. Recorded in English and regional New Mexico Spanish, this compilation of the oral and written culture of the Rio Puerco includes dichos (sayings), adivinanzas (riddles), stories, love quatrains, letters, ballads, and songs within the context such forms were used by a society that, while modest in its means and largely uneducated, presented almost a formal gentility in the manner of its interactions.

Folklore carries the culture of a people, revealing its language, traditions, customs, and manners, in short its sense of self.