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D. W. Meinig recently wrote that "regions are defined by what is
enregioned and thus will likely vary in extent and character with each
shift in focus from one topic to another-or so I believe." Quoting his
Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1500-1970, Meinig
stated, "'Regional delineations should emanate from the purpose of the
study.' Thus the search for some 'best' or 'clear' or' consensus'
definition
that might apply to perspectives ranging from physical geography to
social history to aesthetic response-or whatever, is elusive, and,
ultimately, futile." His wisdom and common sense deserve respect.
But, for those of us who want it-need it-passionately, we can
define the Southwest. It is here to be defined. Gerald Cassidy and Carl
Sauer and Mary Austin and Sharlot Hall and Charles Lummis were not
bamboozled. We get from the Southwest, Laura Adams Armer said,
"the urge to live, the impulse to survive so apparent in a formidable
land; ... [the sense] that nothing stands alone in the universe.... The
earth in process, becomes a symbol of mutability in the Southwest,
understandable and obvious." The Grand Canyon, she wrote, "tells its
story of millions of years of upheaval and erosion ... there is a
nakedness
about the Southwest, a bald truthfulness and at the same time there is a
sense of the hidden. The secret does not lie thinly veiled. It is deep
down
at the heart of things, only to be glimpsed after patient digging."
One thing difficult to understand about the Southwest's landscape is
the comment that the Southwest is "inspirational." For some of us the
place is not inspirational, except to the most brain-dead
vegetables.
Quite the opposite; the place overwhelms you; it leaves nothing to the
imagination and it is intimidating. Hyperbole is the norm here, the run
of the mill, nuts and bolts, meat and potatoes. Gothic cathedrals may be
inspiring; they show the masterwork of man. But how can mere human
beings "be inspired" by the Grand Canyon? That place is more than
awesome, more than humiliating, it knocks you down a peg or two,
does not lift you up; and it reminds you of how insignificant you are.
Descriptions of the Southwest invariably wax hyperbolic. But is hyperbole
even possible here? Of all places in America, the Southwest's physical
presence dominates one's awareness.
The few outstanding native Southwest writers-Luci Tapahonso,
Leslie Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, Marguerite Noble, and Eva Antonia
Wilbur-Cruce-must ignore the "beautiful, cruel" setting, for like all
natives everywhere they take the landscape for granted and focus their
observations on concerns more unpredictable and dynamic, on the more
inconspicuous but very real creatures and activities that populate this
obscenely, grotesquely attractive and captivating region of the planet.
Carpetbagger Southwestern authors such as Tony Hillerman, Charles
Bowden, John Nichols, Ed Abbey, and Bill Eastlake perceive the Southwest
as a "site" or "stage" or "location" or "backdrop" for the expression
of these writers' not necessarily uniquely Southwestern regional
interests: manhood, politics, romance, ecological disaster, detective
mysteries, rebellion, ethnic conflicts, honor, independence, and
anti-urban,
anti-industrial attitudes and beliefs. These are very legitimate concerns,
regionally and universally. But these transplanted authors appear to be
observers of-more than participants in-the region's dynamics, tourists
rather than natives. On the other hand, the native Southwestern
writers focus more on their own intimate and personal relationships
with the region's physical and cultural landscapes. These autochthonous
authors display the consequences of a "natal imprint," they write more
of "moods," "connections," "home," "family," and "place"-of the one-
ness, for better or for worse, of the immutable bond between people
and their native land.
Southwestern architect Henry C. Trost wrote in 1907, "The atmosphere
of the Southwest is wonderfully clear. The mountain masses are
rugged and their shadows and contrast are sharply defined. . . . The
horizons are infinite-long, distant level lines, broken only by the
far-off
mountains or the scrubby desert vegetation against the sky." And despite
his vicious ridicule of the Southwest escapist mentality, D. H.
Lawrence wrote in 1930 of the early-morning Southwest landscape: "It
had a splendid silent terror, and a vast, far-and-wide magnificence which
made it way beyond mere aesthetic appreciation." It is hard to believe
that we are so intellectually refined in nuclear physics, mining, banking,
entertainment, horse breeding, computer science, and many other areas
of human knowledge, but so unrefined in regional identification.
Perhaps most people simply to want to keep it personal and subjective.
Maybe they think the quaintness will be lost and the fun will be gone if
we develop and agree upon a strict definition. In fact, perhaps it is the
vague romanticism and imprecise quaintness that acts as a sop and an
antidote to too much empirical science and too much precise technology.
Sterile knowledge has no texture; formulated (as opposed to
speculative) science has no mystery.
In two ways, clearly, the Southwest as defined here is a distinctive
reality: it has a unique physical geography, and it has a pluralistic
ethnic
makeup. That part of the region lying south of the United States-
Mexican political boundary is still very Mexican, but Anglo investments,
agribusiness, values-TV, hamburguesas, Nike shoes-and
maquiladoras
are making Sonora and Chihuahua more like the United States than vice
versa. The impact of United States culture and values, materially and
otherwise, has been infinitely greater on Latin America than the obverse.
Dislodged from their historical context, the Southwest indigenous cultures
have become a veneer of "quaintness."
But tourists don't know that. They, and the more permanent
grants, too, see the presence of "authentic" Mexican restaurants, even
the conglomerate-corporate-controlled Mexican food franchises popping
up in malls and shopping centers all over the United States, as evidence
that Hispanic culture is enduring and substantial. With time, if the
people of the world don't vaporize themselves first with some of the
various doomsday devices developed at Los Alamos laboratories, the
United States' physiographic and climatic southwestern quadrangle will
become less and less "Southwestern" while Chihuahua and Sonora will,
like most of the rest of the world, become more and more Americanized
and Anglicized. Oriental immigrants to the United States these days
waste little time in becoming proficient in aping the native Anglo-
European Americans. In fact, so much so that in many cases it should be
threatening and frightening to pedigreed Puritan Mugwumps. Within
only a few years and across America the Vietnamese, Japanese, and other
East Asian people have become more successful mainstream Americans
than are the tenth-generation, Protestant, white-skinned indigenes.
New England's Legacy: Cultural Colonialism
Is the Southwest, as many people quoted in this essay assert,
culturally and politically different from the rest of the nation? Is it
regional in
law, food, tempo, politics, ambitions, morals, concepts of status and
such? Despite chicken fried steaks, green chili chimichangas, and Navajo
fry bread, which by now are spreading rapidly throughout the nation,
and in no time, the world, most of the Southwest's Safeway stores carry
the same frozen TV diet dinners, ham and eggs, tofu, and steak and
potatoes found in New Jersey or Oregon supermarkets. While it may
seem logical, there is no visible connection between the "cool" and "laid
back' qualities supposedly found in contemporary California and the
"splendid, idle, mañana land" described in romantic
turn-of-the-century
California history books.
Vestiges of certain laws from Spain related to water rights and
marital
community property can be found in the Arizona law books. But these
particular statutes do not constitute the foundation of jurisprudence in
the Southwest. In fact, Spanish water law, that is, the law of "prior
appropriation" as opposed to the Northern European "riparian rights"
legal tradition, happened to suit the particular interests of Arizona's
nineteenth-century commercial agriculture and the states mining companies.
Were it not for this very all-American motive, the Spanish laws
would not have been perpetuated.
As far as lawful community property rights are concerned, Arizona
has been in the national vanguard of gender equality for more than a
hundred years. Women were wanted in the godforsaken place in the late
nineteenth century, so the men found Hispanic community-property
rights to be an enticement to lure eastern females to the West. And the
leadership in this movement came from reform-minded Yankee Mugwump types,
not Arizona's Hispanics.
Some of the cliched veneer can, of course, be found in New Mexico.
Habits, traditions, "old families," and the like abound in that state. But
the more vital and numerous young people are leaving the old, moribund
Hispanic villages of the Rio Arriba to go to the University of New
Mexico and work in a clean, high-tech Albuquerque industry so as to
have suburban homes, RVs, orthodontia for their children, and vestment
in a good pension system. There are, it is true, scattered remnants
of the old Hispanic period of occupation, but they are declining in
importance and visibility.
The number of "traditional" Hispanics, despite a general population
growth of this ethnic group, continues to decline. Some of these older
people, if they are not too proud, will take advantage of "liberal"
government food-stamp programs, as will some young families, in a
proportion
equal to that of other segments of American society. But in another
generation or two their descendants will be fully assimilated into the
American mainstream. They will forget their language and other cultural
legacies, become conspicuous consumers, and vote Republican. Even
today, about as close to their heritage as some Mexican-American children
get is a trip to the nearest Taco Bell fast-food franchise. Although
late in doing so, New Mexico-like eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R.-
is now moving from formalism to functionalism at a rapidly accelerating
pace. A similar process characterizes the Arizona and New Mexico Indian
tribes.
In his classic novella The Bear, William Faulkner attempted to
explain
that America's baronial myths were part of a very old legacy. Americans,
North and South, Faulkner said, had escaped to a "new world." Here,
they believed, they had found a "continent dedicated as a refuge and a
sanctuary of liberty and freedom from ... the old world's worthless
evening." Western Civilization, corrupt and decadent and moribund,
was infected with the evils of social tyranny, economic despair, and
political dissolution. Unavoidably-and naturally-germs of greed and
suspicion, fear and vanity found their way across the Atlantic with the
first
colonists. The new land was "tainted before any white man owned it ...
as though [carried] in the sailsful of the old world's tainted wind which
drove the ships." Thus all America had been "born lost."
In Faulkner's view, this infection produced a variety of pathological
symptoms. The Southern regional myth with its "respectability" and
"refinement" was a crude, cosmetic, homespun regional shawl draped
to hide the crippled national body. The puffed up, vacillating, and
oxymoronic qualities of effete vigor, arrogant doubt, sweet despair, and a
"glowing sense of doom" permeated this perspective. If there is a present
or a future, Faulkner felt, it is envisioned in terms of a mythical past.
In
The Bear Faulkner catalogued the investors and bankers and
corporate
agents and politicians who were the infectious carriers of the entire
nation's terminal malaise. This included the South, and by our inference,
the Southwest, too. Mankind's potential for virtue in confrontation with
nature is profound. But banks and railroads and real estate speculators
are more "natural" and certainly more "American" and much more attractive
than the "frontier" way. Contrary to Frederick Jackson Turner's
"frontier" theory, the nation's traits that were retained and came to
characterize and dominate all of America were the degenerate traditional
traits from the Old World. The virtues Turner claims grew out of the
American frontier experience to become part of the American character,
were, according to Faulkner, the very ones which slipped away.
Conspicuously, despite the Southwest's physiographic uniqueness
and ethnic heterogeneity, the region's cultural qualities, when reduced
to their most essential and significant substance and potency, appear
clearly to be the same as those found in Boston or Cincinnati or Dallas
or Seattle or Miami. The operant culture (as opposed to the affected
style) of the region-its laws, official language, politics, religions, and
ideologies, and the dominant tastes in music, food, automobiles, and
vacations, with only a few colorful exceptions that highlight the general
rule-represent national and global preferences more than anything
"regional." The supreme irony-among many ironies-of this regional
self-awareness lies in the fact that at the very time the Mugwumps were
spinning their back-to-nature fantasies about the Southwest, the vanguard
of urban-industrial America was rapidly developing in the very
same place.
Cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky has written,
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the various Hispanic-American and aboriginal groups swallowed
by the dynamic Anglo-American frontier were minor sources of
influence for the national culture. . . . Despite the stubborn roman-
tic inclination to believe otherwise, the settlement frontier cannot
be credited with the origination of any important inventions, ma-
terial or otherwise.... In general ... the frontier played a passive
role in the American cultural drama.
By the end of the eighteenth century, cultural leadership had
passed on to the more developed portions of New England, then
rapidly ascendant in commercial and manufacturing activity.
Throughout the nineteenth century, this region was clearly the
most fecund and powerful, setting an example for the whole country in many
departments of higher human endeavor. By virtue of
the vigorous out-migration of New Englanders and the diffusion
of ideas and objects through other means, the national patterns in
industrial technology and mechanical devices of all sorts, higher
education, science, literature and the other fine arts, theology,
political ideas, manners, and the domestic and public architecture
were largely controlled by this single small region.
In fact, the cultural geography of nineteenth century America
can be described, without serious exaggeration, as the continual
pumping and spraying outward to west and south of a great array
of novelties, locally invented or imported from abroad, from the
New England reservoir. |
The Mugwump mind brought-and continues to perpetuate-its cultural
colonialism in and about the Southwest in two very powerful,
enduring, totally contradictory, and nonindigenous forms: the Heroic
Triad mythologies, and the Puritan mainstream. Charles Lummis may
have identified and extolled the wishful bliss of poco tiempo, but,
as a
compulsive Boston workaholic and status-seeker he brought with him,
too, Faulkner's germs "of the old world's [and New England's] tainted
wind." Apart from some moribund nucleated pockets and self-conscious
ethnic enclaves (you'll see no television antennae at Taos Pueblo; the
tourists would pout-and leave), today's Southwest's dominant modus
operandi and modus vivendi, in terms of everyday values and
attitudes, are
derived from mainstream Anglo-American traditions. Corporatism,
capitalism, reason, agribusiness, organizational participation,
materialism, conventional Democrats and Republicans, and worship of the
GNP
make up the foundations and other basic structural components of
Southwest "culture."
Santa Feans read the Wall Street Journal while they savor their
gourmet posole and menudo. Phoenix Rotarians may wear bola
ties and cowboy boots, but they vote Republican, eat steak and potatoes,
and go to
the Presbyterian church for the same reasons that rep-stripe tie and
tassel-
loafered Boston Rotarians do. (Actually, the men in Phoenix who wear
tassel-loafered shoes probably outnumber, numerically and proportionately,
those Bostonians so shod. And during a sartorial rage a few years
back, cowboy boots probably sold better in Boston than they did in
Phoenix, one of the few conspicuous examples of Turner's thesis.) A
commitment to disposability; planned obsolescence; and the ubiquitous
American God, the GNP, together with its bitch-goddess consort "Success,"
with a liturgical pattern of beliefs and rituals and practices and
penances more holy than catechism, baptism, confession, and the stations
of the cross all combined mark the Albuquerque Hispano-Catholic
businessman in the same way and to the same degree as they do his
Anglo-Catholic counterpart in Indianapolis. Increasingly, we can expect
to see these changes accelerating in Sonora and Chihuahua, too-every-
where below the 29th Parallel-and throughout the world, for that
matter.
Macro-enviromnentalist Theodore Roszak has found what seem to
be entropic symptoms in all this:
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The international unities that matter significantly remain those
of trade, warfare, and technics: the unities of power. The world is
being bound together by the affluent societies in ingenious networks
of investment, military alliance, and commerce which, in
themselves, can only end by propagating an oppressive urban-
industrial uniformity over the earth. Yet there is no lack of "forward-
looking" opinion makers who accept that uniformity as the highest
expression of a world culture. They mistake the homogenized
architecture of airports, hotels, and conference centers-which is
as much as many jet-set intellectuals ever see of the world-for an
authentic sharing and synthesis of sensibilities....
In another two generations, there will be no primitive or tribal
societies left anywhere on earth-and they are not all giving up
their traditional ways because they freely choose to. In another
three generations, no self-determining rural life. In another four
generations, no wildlife or wilderness on land or sea outside protected
areas and zoos. Today there are few societies where official
policy works to preserve wilderness and the old ways of life as
serious alternatives to the urban-industrial pattern; at best, they
are being embalmed and tarted up as tourist attractions.
Of course there are those who think the accessible counterfeit
is far superior to any reality one must take pains to approach and
know. After all, the whole force of urban-industrialism upon our
tastes is to convince us that artificiality is not only inevitable, but
better-perhaps finally to shut the real and original out of our
awareness entirely. |
The Hopi resisted and turned back both Diego de Vargas and the
Church of Rome, but they cannot resist Wal-Mart and Michael Jackson
and Boeing 747s.
The baronial model, that fanciful, reactionary, agrarian alternative
imagery of the Southwest, is just that-a painkilling fantasy. It offers a
momentary and vicarious escape from big government, the madness of
urban-industrial uniformity and conformity, vague laws, a frequent and
nagging sense of impotence, and a strong but still uncertain awareness
of an immobile and undefined elusive purpose. Contrary to Turnerian
concepts of the frontier, much of the Southwest was-under this
manipulative
and mercantilistic system-urban, industrial, and aristocratic before
it developed into anything else. In the Southwest one can see the
late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century American transition from
an entrepreneurial, experimental, technologically unsophisticated,
individualistic economy and society to the finance-centered, scientific,
specialized, "expert," corporate form that characterizes mainstream
America today. If anything, the Southwest should be an obvious and easily
identified example of everything the Mugwump-type romanticists, past
and present, say it is not.
So, there is then still today, a great deal of misunderstanding and
ignorance about the historical, cultural, social, economic, and political
nature of the American Southwest. People living in this region have
swallowed the Mugwump Heroic Triad bunkum painkiller as much or
even more than have those living elsewhere. While the very cutting edge
of the nuclear age and its unthinkable reality can be found right in
our Southwestern front yard (or playground, to squeeze the metaphor
further) and still, even now after the Cold War has gone, moves the
world toward some unimaginable incineration (don't forget Khaddafi
and Hussein), most Southwesterners continue to wallow in the infantile
comfort of a bogus heritage with its crudely concocted images of noble
Navajos and casas adobes con vigas y estuco.
More realistically we should recognize-in the most passionate
political way-the Southwest for what it is, a region whose
landscape and
extractive potential long ago made the arrea an integral and complementary
part of the American Industrial Revolution and the atomic age. In
fact, as is true of the rest of America, industrial, commercial,
corporate,
governmental, and bureaucratic interests for the past 140 years or more
have always sponsored and manipulated all the developmental aspects of
the Southwest-economic, political, social, and, thanks to the Mugwumps,
cultural. Anglo Arizona, for example, was industrial and corporate before
it was in any substantial way pastoral, agrarian, commercial,
or recreational. In fact, were it not for such technological developments
as telegraph and power lines, railroads, atomic reactors, automobiles,
computers, refrigeration, and hydroelectric turbines, few people would
be here today. Moreover, huge plundered profits derived from the
Southwest's natural resources over the past 120 years have contributed
greatly to the rapid expansion of American self-capitalization-and to
the trust accounts of Boston, San Francisco, and New York investors.
Interestingly, the most compelling indigenous Southwest authors-
Leslie Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce, and Marguerite
Noble-primarily write about the past; that is to say, they know the
difference between the present and the past. The immigrants, on the
other hand, write stories that are contemporary, yet contain all the
ingredients of the mythic past. These perpetual tourists-and ephemeral
tourists, too-see, hear, and smell cliched Southwestern ambiences and
environments. Native writers feel the "presence" of the land, but because
they take it for granted, are not so calculated and self-conscious about
it. They indicate no awareness of the classic regional cliches, even as
history, while carpetbaggers like Ed Abbey and John Nichols attempt to
do just the opposite and try to make us believe that viable remnants of
the old cliched images still persist by putting the Heroic Triad in a
contemporary setting and time frame. Their vision of the Southwest
reflects
a fabricated awareness of the region in the same sense that the "Santa Fe
style" of furniture and architecture reflect the superimposition of
external curiosity and romance of the early and current twentieth century.
The wonderfully sensitive-and politic-geographer Yi-Fu Tuan tells
us: "The American Southwest reminds us how little the popular image
of a place depends on scrupulous historical knowledge.' The manipulation
of the region's imagery knows no limits. Early-twentieth-century
Southwest tourist extraordinaire Mabel Dodge Luhan didn't want
plumbing to be installed in Taos Pueblo; she thought it necessarily
quaint that the Taos women carry their jars of water on their heads.
(Did they carry out their chamberpots that way, too?) This attitude has
not changed. Today's shorts-clad, camera-draped tourists want the
Southwest to be a collection of sterile museum dioramas that reflect
their own antiseptic epidermal sensibilities.
Bioregionalist Peter Berg wrote: "The boundaries of a bioregion are
best described by people who have lived within it, through human
recognition of the realities of living in [one's native] place." And
bioregionalist Judith Plant has said that "bioregionalism gives us roots,
not just
history," a way "for knowing one's people and place is the ancient way
of survival and its memory is stirred by our yearning for home." In the
light of these perceptions, it seems to me that before we can understand
the Southwest realistically we must first develop a sense of place based
on a view that looks from the inside out instead of the New England
Brahmins' and the current trendy environmentalists' perspective of looking
from the outside in.
A person can never fully adopt someone else's culture; not even Ron
Ives and Amado Muro could do that. In this regard, we might listen to
the words of the distinguished Mississippi regionalist author Eudora
Welty who, In the Eye of the Story, wrote:
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It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge
where you are. Place absorbs our earliest notice and attention, it
bestows on us our original awareness; and our critical powers
spring up from the study of it and growth of experience inside it.
It perseveres in bringing us back to earth when we fly too high. It
never really stops informing us, for it is forever astir, alive, changing,
reflecting, like the mind of man itself One place comprehended
can make us understand other places better. Sense of place
gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction,
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Smog, acid rain, hunters ("sportsmen"), deforestation, overgrazing,
mountain bikes, mining, urban blight and suburban sprawl, high-
voltage transmission lines, jet plane contrails, homes "with a view,"
water ranches, ATCs and dune buggies, dams, thousands of square miles
of concrete and asphalt, summer homes, and new roads to every nook
and cranny of the region are rapidly changing the physical features of
the Southwest. As a cultural region, whatever might at one time have
been "native" to the Southwest has been disappearing for a long time,
too. In the meantime the immigrants and the tourists have brought
their bourgeois tastes and escapist preconceptions with them and have
taken it upon themselves, in a reckless and mean-spirited way, to tell the
world what this region is "really like," thus also destroying the original
cultural landscape.
Southwest natives could never see their own culture as "enchanting"
or "quaint" or "amusing." Nor could they ever perceive their own daily,
local landscape as "breathtaking" or "glorious." Those people,
emigrés
and natives alike, who would like to experience a more dignified, subtle,
rich, and multilayered version of the Southwest as a region, should open
their minds and their hearts and listen to the words of Eudora Welty ...
and to the native writers of this region. Then they may be able to begin
to salvage-physically and spiritually-whatever is left of the Southwest's
original uniqueness.
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