After helping my dad briefly with some tree-trimming at his house this morning, followed by a Blake’s burrito break, I came home and relaxed for a few and then headed on down to visit the library at UNM today.

My main goal was to get access to books in Zimmerman Library, and to also get access to documents in the library’s Center for Southwest Research, which houses special items on New Mexico and Southwestern history.

It was probably my first time back visiting the library since I finished business school back in 2005, which means it had been 12 years since I was in the library- and yes, it is different now.

However, to fulfill goals one and two above, I needed really to get a UNM library card for a non-student, which I did.

I spent my first hours in the Center for Southwest Research for the bulk of the afternoon, scanning their database of archived items for de Anza related documents, and I found several that seemed of great interest. Two were copies of journal sections by de Anza himself, which I quickly found I could not use: I could not read or understand the Spanish in his handwritten pages.

The third item I found was a typed manuscript of a lecture given by a man named Scholes called “Conquistadors as Business Man’, and although it was specifically on the mentality of Cortez as the uber-conquistador who rolled his ventures and adventures into cash machines as he took tributes and labor from the best of the communities he conquered in the New World, the lecture shed light on the mind of pretty much every conquistador that put his fate in adventures in New Spain: the collection of worldly goods suggested that a man (perhaps mostly to that man) had accrued honor for the King and the Church in Spain. I did learn that in Cortez’s time, one Indian slave was worth 1 peso and 1 bushel of maize, and that 1 negro slave was worth 15 Indian slaves. A work horse was worth 20 to 30 Indian slaves. And the Conquistadors in Mexico were, early on, pretty okay with indenturing their Indian captives until their hands were slapped by the King’s men back home.

After reading through the enlightening Scholes document, I went up to the second level in Zimmerman and found 6 books on Anza or early New Mexico history which I checked out and brought home with me.

I am now looking for any documents that shed more light into the personality and character of the man. I am still trying to figure out for myself who he really was, while I hang on to my present notion that he is a great subject for a script.

After visiting the library, I came home and napped a bit and turned on tonight’s Cubs game against the Orioles and watched the Cubs build a 7 run lead before I shut it off and then went to my sister’s house. She was holding an open house for friends and family, a time for her people to all meet and mingle, and in that, to wish my father a happy birthday since his 76th is Monday. The evening ended with a family cards game. It was a nice evening- the weather was cool and the skies were clear with patches of clouds here and there. The air was delicious for sleeping outside, and I am hoping some of it finds me in my room tonight as I sleep.