I was born and raised in the northern New Mexico community of Los Ojos and received my undergraduate and graduate degrees from Highlands University in Las Vegas, NM. I served as the New Mexico State Historian from 1987 to 2000 and in the past four decades have published five non-fiction books, and contributed chapters and essays to nearly twenty textbooks and anthologies. Since 1992, I have written a monthly history column under the byline "Voices From the Past," and have published more than one hundred articles in scholarly and popular publications such as New Mexico Magazine, True West, and New Mexico Historical Review. I speak regularly at local historical, genealogical, and social organizations and clubs, utilizing my forty years experience in New Mexico's archives to speak on a wide variety of topics. Favorite topics include crime and punishment and the judicial systems from New Mexico's Spanish colonial period through the "wild west" of the late nineteenth century, and Spanish colonial relations with Native American groups.