La Sociedad: Guardians of Hispanic Culture Along the Rio Grande
By José A. Rivera
University of New Mexico Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0 8263-4894-4
Photographs by Daniel Salazar et al.
Reviewed by Virginia McConnell Simmons
In 1900, led by Celedonia Mondragón of Antonito, his Hispanic neighbors organized the Sociedad Protección Mútua de Trabajadores Unidos, which soon had 65 chapters called concilios throughout rural southern Colorado, northern New Mexico, and a few places in Utah. These buildings once bore, or still bear in many cases, the fading initials SPMDTU for brevity’s sake, as the facades often tended to be small.