La Turca: A Historical Drama in Three Acts

by Donald A. Barclay

La Turca is a stage play loosely based on the entrada (expedition) lead by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. From 1540 to 1542, Coronado's army of some 300 soldiers (plus a few thousand Indian allies and servants) wandered from what is now Compostela, Mexico through Arizona, New Mexico, Northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and back to Compostela. The non-Indian members of the expedition, most of whom had gone into debt to finance their participation, were looking for cities of gold, of which they found none. Although they passed through what are now considered some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, to the members of the expedition it was all a vast wasteland. La Turca weaves together the West's past and present in a raw drama that explores the ideas and emotions driving individuals and cultures into conflict. The characters are unforgettable and the stakes are high in this fictionalized telling of the first "illegal immigration" into what is now Arizona.

124 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2012

About the author

Donald A. Barclay has been an academic librarian since 1990, holding library positions at New Mexico State University, the University of Houston, the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center, and the University of California, Merced. His interests in librarianship include the history of print and digital information, the role of information in the Digital Age, and the evaluation of information. At UC Merced he was instrumental in planning the library for the first (and, to date, only) new U.S. research university of the twenty-first century.

During his career Donald has published numerous books and articles on such topics as fake news, library construction and maintenance, library management, and the literature of the American West. His books include:

--Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies: How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age

--Serving Online Customers: Lessons for Libraries from the Business World

--The Library Renovation, Maintenance, and Construction Handbook

--Into the Wilderness Dream: Exploration Narratives of the American West, 1500-1805

--A Rendezvous Reader: Tall, Tangles, and True Tales of the Mountain Men, 1805-1850

Besides working as a librarian, Donald has taught college English and worked as a fire fighter on a U.S. Forest Service hotshot crew.