Mark Santiago retired in 2020 after working in the museum field for almost 37 years. He served with the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs for 20 years as director of the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo (2000-2006) and the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces (2006-2020). Before going to New Mexico, he worked for nearly 17 years with the Arizona Historical Society at the Yuma, Tempe, and Tucson branches, serving as a Curator, Registrar, Collections Manager, and Special Projects Manager.
As a historian, his interest is in Spanish colonial history, and he has published seventeen articles in scholarly journals as well as four award winning books: The Red Captain: The Life of Hugo O'Conor, Commandant Inspector of the Interior Provinces (Arizona Historical Society, 1994); Massacre at the Yuma Crossing: Spanish Relations with the Quechans, 1779–1782 (University of Arizona Press, 1998 and 2010); The Jar of Severed Hands: Spanish Deportation of Apache Prisoners of War, 1770–1810 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), and his latest, A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795–1799 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). This last effort has won several awards, including the 2019 Robert M. Utley Award for best Military History from the Western History Association. Forthcoming in 2025 from Texas A&M University Press is A Shadow of Ireland: Hugo O’Conor, an 18th Century Soldier in the Old World and the New, a full-length biography of Hugo O’Conor who served as the Commandant Inspector of the Interior Provinces between 1772 and 1777.