"The Search for Pedro's Story" recreates the life experiences of Pedro Peres, a leather jacket soldier in the Spanish colonial army in eighteenth-century Texas.
Each chapter begins with a signpost artifact related to one of Pedro's roles--soldier, horseman, explorer, guard, spouse, messenger, and cowboy--and ends with a fictional account of an event in Pedro's life from the findings.
The discipline of history usually focuses on heroic deeds and people, but Martinello thinks its methods of detection should also reveal how ordinary people lived. In "The Search for Pedro's Story," fragments of a real life are pieced together from things Pedro knew, including taming a mustang and playing cards. The book suggests how to ask questions, seek sources, and make sense of findings that history, especially the history of the ordinary, demands.