Rosanne Boyett Title: “Beyond the Edge of the Known World” Author: Jerry Ortiz y Pino Published: 2026 Paperback, 383 pages Publisher: U.N.M., unmpress.com From the UNM Querencias Series, which promotes a transnational, humanistic, and creative vision of the US-Mexico borderlands ISBN: 978-0-8263-6981-9
“A man who has read a thousand books is armed for life; a man who has read none is easy prey. The man who has read a thousand books has lived a thousand lives. He has seen cities he has never visited, spoken to men who died centuries ago, and walked in worlds that no longer exist. Reading does not merely inform him; it enlarges him. It stretches the boundaries of his own experience until he becomes something more than himself.”
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874–1936, a famous English writer, poet, and Christian apologist who wrote nearly 100 books and thousands of essays. His best known works include the priest-detective series Father Brown and Orthodoxy, a spiritual autobiography.
Jerry Ortiz y Pino, an 83-year-old first time author, weaves a fascinating vision of how the past affects the future. His novel about an orphaned fourteenyear-old boy of mixed heritage draws on the origins of Spanish rule in the New World and the international events that shaped 19th century life.
In Europe, the Umayyad, Muslims from North Africa, invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 CE; Umayyad Prince Abd al-Rahman claimed the Peninsula in 755 CE. The Spanish monarchy ousted the last of the Moors from the Emirate of Granada in 1492.
In the Americas, Spanish explorer Don Juan de Onate claimed and colonized the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico in 1598 and established the region's first permanent Spanish settlement.
Two centuries later, Don Pedro Bautista Pino was chosen as the sole delegate from Santa Fe to represent the isolated province at the 1812 Cortes de Cádiz in Spain. His mandate: petition the Spanish crown for financial aid, education, and defense resources for the province of Santa Fe.
The elderly statesman commands his Genízaro grandson, Juan de los Reyes Baca, to accompany him along with Juan’s tutor, Bartolome.
Don Pedro is responsible for paying all the expenses involved in the venture. He organizes a caravan of oxen-drawn wagons for the dangerous trip which begins at his hacienda in Santa Fe, travels 1,545 miles on the Camino Real to the port city of Veracruz, Mexico, and there the delegation boards a freighter bound for Cadiz, Spain.
The tutor requires his young scholar to keep a diary in addition to reading one chapter each day from the classic novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
Juan is totally enthralled by Don Quixote, an aging minor nobleman from La Mancha (Spain) and his loyal squire, Sancho Panza. The teenager vows to live his life by the precepts espoused in the romantic tale which was published in two parts (1605 and in 1615).
Juan makes daily entries into his journal, which forms the narrative of “Beyond the Edge of the Known World.” His writings record how Juan matures from an idealistic youth into adulthood.
He describes life with his adopted grandfather, raids by hostile Native tribes, disease and mutiny aboard an ocean-going freighter, encounters with the criminal underworld in Spain, slavery in Cuba, life in a Mexican brothel, his prison sentence which includes working for Governor Bermudez of San Luis Potosi after he returns to Mexico, and the five months he volunteered at La Academia Guadalupe in Chihuahua, Mexico.
“What you and the students [orphans from various Native tribes] showed me tonight is how the two worlds can be brought together, without ‘conquest’ or ‘conversion.’ Just two kinds of people learning from one another. And it is beautiful. I hope your work succeeds. But not many Spanish, or for that matter criollos [people of full Spanish descent born in the Spanish colonies of the Americas] seem interested in the indigenas for anything more than how to make money off them, their bodies, their labor, their lands,” Juan tells the abbess as he departs on the final leg of his journey home to his grandfather’s hacienda. He eventually emigrates to the U.S.
“New Mexico may have indeed been the edge of the known world in 1810, but it was already being pulled into the whirlwind of changes occurring across the globe that would culminate in independence from Spain, economic interdependence with the United States, tentative experiments with democracy as the northernmost province of Mexico, failed invasions by the Republic of Texas, and finally, conquest by the US after an invasion and war bloodily severed our ties to Mexico,” explained the author. “And it [this] is a novel, not history.”
Spanish Empire maps continued to identify Nuevo Mexico as “the edge of the known world” until 1821 when Spain signed the Treaty of Cordoba, which ended Spanish rule in North America and recognized Mexico as a free nation.
Sidebar:
Jerry Ortiz y Pino, (1943 - ), is an American politician and social worker who formerly served as a member of the New Mexico Senate, where he represented the 12th district from 2005 - 2025.