The Blood of the Conquerors

Harvey Fergusson’s first novel opens in a Southwestern town around the turn of the twentieth century, where Ramon Delcasar carries the pride of an old New Mexican rico family whose Spanish ancestors once held a vast royal land grant. That wealth has thinned, and power has passed to Anglo-American newcomers. Trained as a lawyer and hungry to climb, Ramon schemes over the family lands, works the courts, and pursues Julia Roth, a visiting Eastern woman who might carry him into that new world. Neither the land nor the romance holds. In the end he is thrown back among his own people, farming a small place and living much like the ordinary Mexican folk his forebears once ruled. Fergusson, an Albuquerque native, writes conquest and racial distrust without sentiment.