The Mesilla is a historical fiction coming of age story that will take you into the wild southwest of the 1880s. At 14 years old, Jesus ‘Chuy’ Perez Contreras Verazzi Messi is too small and frail to work the land on the family farm near the Rio Bravo in Mexico. The local padre’s tutoring reveals Jesus’s unending curiosity and fertile mind. When his uncle, noted Las Cruces, New Mexico attorney and politician, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain agrees to take his nephew, under his wing. Jesus ‘reads law’ with his uncle and shares adventures and adversity with the Fountains and other historic Mesilla and Tularosa Valley citizens. His coming of age story will take you into the wild southwest, a brewing range war, a territory struggling toward statehood, courtroom dramas, and the adventures and adversities of a boy’s quest for manhood.

The book is a fictional memoir by Jesus about the ten years leading to the notorious and unsolved Fountain murders. You will find yourself living in 1886 Las Cruces in the Territory of New Mexico as the little town begins to establish itself as a hub of New Mexican politics. The interplay of Jesus’ training in the law, maturing to manhood and his observations of the political landscape of the New Mexico Territory is set against the backdrop of a post-civil war America. Join the Fountain family for the wild ride that was the American wild west.