Few have been the individuals from northern New Mexico’s 400-year-old Spanish-speaking villages who have taken the time to write down the significant events of their lives. Ascensión J. Martínez of Chimayó, is however a notable exception. Born in 1926 in the village of Chimayó, his life has spanned a period of momentous developments locally, nationally and in the world at large.

Within the pages of this book, Walk with Me to Chimayó, a Memoir by Ascensión J. Martínez of Chimayó, the author describes the Chimayó of his youth when the rest of the country had yet made few inroads into one of this nation’s oldest and most isolated agrarian societies. By “walking” the reader through his earliest memories of contributing to his family’s demanding life of self-sufficiency and later, his first tenuous steps into mainstream American society, Ascensión enables the reader to experience the subtle yet at times dramatically-changing cultural landscape of that period.

One of the book’s highlights is his account of the final days of World War II in the Philippine theater of war where he participated as a soldier and barely escaped with his life intact. The fact that he visited Hiroshima, Japan, soon after it was leveled to the ground by the atom bomb, has enabled him to write a poignant description of what he saw.

The present memoir also chronicles his many years working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, his life as a family man and as a civic and religious leader in his community. This memoir is the sequel to: The Working Life of an Hispano Patriarch, 1890-1976, the life story of his father Apolonio Martínez, and a work that he helped to translate, edit and publish.