Resolana : A New Mexico Family's Memoir of Place

Resolana captures the transformative journey of countercultural homesteaders drawn to northern New Mexico during the 1970s and stresses the value of community, resilience, reciprocity, and stewardship of the land.

In northern New Mexico, la resolana is “the place where the sun shines”—the warm, south-facing side of a home where people gather and stories are shared. In this intimate, multigenerational memoir, Adelma Aurora returns to her family’s ranch on Mesa Poleo to understand the history that binds her family to the land.

Drawing on journals, letters, and essays spanning more than five decades, Adelma Aurora braids her voice with those of her back-to-the-land homesteader parents, her brother, and her sons to trace three generations shaped by the land of Arroyo del Agua. From idealistic hippie beginnings and communal living to heartbreak, displacement, and return, Resolana follows a family tested by tragedy yet sustained by place.

At its heart, Adelma Aurora’s story is one of family history and land-based wisdom and of neighbors who teach survival and reciprocity, of water shared and work exchanged, of roots planted deeply in New Mexico soil. As Adelma Aurora inherits the ranch and tends it with her own children, she discovers that home is a living inheritance of kinship, memory, and care, not simply a place.

Resolana is a moving meditation on belonging and the enduring power of place to hold family together across generations.