Olivama Salazar de Valdez, my mother, announced at the breakfast table one day during the Sixties that she would like to someday write a book about her recollection of life in Los Sauces, Colorado, a Spanish-speaking community and the place of her birth, as she remembered it in the Twenties and Thirties. It wasn't until many years later when she was already in her eighties that she finally started writing her manuscript for the bilingual book. I helped by keyboarding her work into my computer, and discussing various aspects of the manuscript with her. The book was a delightful collaboration between the two of us. The first edition, a comb-bound book of about 100 pages, was finished in 1999. Only 250 copies were printed. We soon sold out of them all.
Mother and I continued to collaborate on the next edition.
During that time I added pertinent historical information
to the book. The new softcover book of 287 pages (published
by Adobe Village Press) was finally finished after working
on it for six years. The kickoff (photo below) for the
release of the book was held on September 21, 2005 at
a
¿Qué Pasa? Family Breakfast
held in
Alamosa, Colorado.
We did not know that she would soon become very ill and
pass away from an aggressive brain tumor before the end of
that same year. She saw her big project, the book "Life in
Los Sauces" completed, and did get to autograph about one
hundred copies before she passed away on December 13, 2005.
