To Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, rural life represented the best in people — neighborliness, strong families and healthy habits.

Her long life of 97 years was proof that she knew her stuff and followed her own advice.

Born in 1894 on her family's land grant southeast of Las Vegas, N.M., Cabeza de Baca appreciated her roots but wanted to know the world, too, living for a time in Spain as a young woman and in Mexico later in her career.

And Cabeza de Baca wrote widely, offering urban dwellers and later generations an authentic view of how material life in Northern New Mexico was so closely tied to the land and a sense of place.

She was an educated, independent, well-traveled woman, but always she let others know she drew inspiration from the simple dignity of rural life.

As a teenager on the ranch, she skipped household chores in favor of spending time with the men who worked outside, biographer Maureen Reed said.

Cabeza de Baca taught school for several years after earning a teaching degree. Then her ties to farm and ranch life tugged at her, inspiring her to get a home-economics degree at New Mexico State University and to take a job helping homemakers in the villages of Northern New Mexico.

As a Santa Fe County agent, she organized clubs for women and children, taught canning techniques, developed home crafts and found markets for rural products.

Eventually, she went as part of a United Nations mission to Mexico to establish a home-economics program and to teach skills in growing and preparing food.

Her experiences with cultural change and inequality led her to criticize subtly the static notions of culture and femininity, but in a voice that was "romantic, accommodating, and traditionalist," Reed wrote in A Woman's Place: Women Writing New Mexico.

Cabeza de Baca widened her influence through writing. Her popular 1939 cookbook, Historic Cookery, included recipes she collected from village cooks and tested in her own kitchen.

She published The Good Life in 1949 to celebrate the close relationships among village women who overcame the hardships of rural life.

In 1953, she published We Fed Them Cactus, a compelling blend of folklore, history and memoir that focused on Hispanos who settled the plains.

"Fabiola Cabeza de Baca would probably be surprised and amused at the controversy her life and works created during the Chicano movement of the 1970s and after her death (in 1991)," Kate K. Davis wrote in American Women Writers, 1900-1945. "Her books received generally good reviews at the time of publication. They have since been criticized as elitist and not representative of the realistic Chicano experience."

Contact Rob Dean at 986-3033 or rdean@sfnewmexican.com.