Where have all the Corn Mothers gone?

This is a very odd book. Ramon Gutierrez wants to deliver to his readers a fair and balanced account of the colonization of the Pueblo world. He begins somewhat admirably. The first part of his book presents an ethno-historical account of the Pueblo world on the eve of the Spanish conquest. His use of later sources can be somewhat forgiven here since nothing remains outside archaeology to represent the Pueblo world before the coming of the Spaniards and their written record; if only he had used it. Yet he represents the observations of early twentieth century anthropologists as windows into the unchanging world of Pueblo society.
Had he then went on the do the same with Spain, the other “world” that he describes, this might be forgiven. To be fair, he does offer a small account of the end of the Reconquista, but there is no “fictional” narrative constructed to help the story along, and it’s pretty much all downhill from here on in. And what about the Corn Mothers, they pretty much disappear after the first few pages of the book. They truly “go away”. Perhaps this is also defensible, simply because the Pueblos in general pretty much disappear as well. Once he gets into what seems to be his favorite part of the book, i.e. anything with lots of statistics on Spanish ideas of honor and marriage, the Pueblo people are irrelevant, only the progeny of his two worlds: the genizaros.
His sources are another source of befuddlement. Among other things he claims to have defined “honor” for 17th century New Mexico through the citation of Hobbes’s Leviathan. He also claims a more intimate knowledge of Pueblo life, often citing in support of his observations: “to this day.” As a corollary he even changes tense when he is supposedly offering an analysis of early modern New Mexico. I am certainly not an expert, but imagine that understandings of honor have significantly changed in the intervening 300 or so years. He also includes a façade of statistics which seems only to serve to “scientificize” his un-even analysis.
This book claims to give “vision to the blind,” but only ends up hiding the culture of the people who inhabited the Pueblos after the Conquest. One would think that there would be more sources available through Spanish documents, but the best analysis of Pueblo culture that we have is reserved for the pre-Spanish era. For Ramon Gutierrez the Corn Mothers leave, only to return when they can usefully serve as a stand-in for Pueblo culture.