Doomed from the beginning to be read as history rather than poetry, Gaspar P rez de Villagr 's Historia de la Nueva M xico chronicles Captain Juan de O ate's conquest of New Mexico from its inception in 1595 to the battle of Acoma in 1599. Its publication in 1610 was overshadowed by Cervantes's already wildly popular Don Quixote, and fewer than a dozen copies of the original have survived the last four centuries. In April of 1610, the same month that...