Cobos was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila in 1911 and moved to San Antonio, Texas with his family in 1925 after the death of his father.

In 1927 the family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where Cobos starting taking classes at the Menaul School.

Immediately after graduation,[2] Cobos would teach Spanish, natural sciences, the history of the United States, and coach basketball in Wagon Mound, New Mexico in 1937 and 1938.

As a physical education teacher, he trained "a kind of CCC camp... a little army" of students to be ready for a possible world war since Europe was "not looking too well.

Cobos taught Spanish, Southwestern United States Hispanic American folklore, and Ibero-American civilization.

Included in this collection are hundreds of personal interviews and countless examples of corridos and inditas (local ballads), children's games and songs, folktales, chistes (anecdotes), jokes, home remedies, recipes, narratives dealing with local events, proverbs, riddles, songs, versos (rhymed quatrains), and witch stories and accounts of witchcraft.

THE SPANISH SPOKEN in rural areas of New Mexico and southern Colorado can be described as a regional type of language made up of archaic (sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) Spanish; Mexican Indian words, mostly from the Náhuatl; a few indigenous Rio Grande Indian words; words and idiomatic expressions peculiar to the Spanish of Mexico (the so-called mexicanismos); local New Mexico and southern Colorado vocabulary; and countless language items from English which the Spanish-speaking segment of the population has borrowed and adapted for everyday use.

New Mexico and southern Colorado Spanish, quite uniform over the whole geographical area, has survived by word of mouth for over four hundred years in a land that until very recent times was almost completely isolated from other Spanish-speaking centers.

... in the 1980s, the dialect is losing its struggle for existence because English is the official language of the area (notwithstanding state constitutional articles or amendments to the contrary–especially in New Mexico).

[7] Cobos' hobbies included "building telescopes, doing carpentry work and watching old movies," as well as tending to his collection of folklore.