Travel Narratives from New Mexico: Reconstructing Identity and Truth
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Travel Narratives from New Mexico: Reconstructing Identity and T ...

Chapter 1:  New Mexico's Genesis as Symbolic Landscape
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modernity” (qtd. in Auerbach 43). Since Western epistemology believed that mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century New Mexico Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache communities still functioned and behaved, for the most part, as they had functioned and behaved before the New England colonies had been established, many Euro-Americans and Europeans who traveled to New Mexico felt they had found a new, unfallen Eden. Auerbach offers Cushing's travel to New Mexico as an example:

Cushing's encounter at Zuni revived the faded dream of America as an Edenic paradise, ancient Israel renewed. If not in the teeming cities and fiery factories of the East, then in the pueblos of the Southwest, among native tribes of whom most Americans were completely oblivious, might the biblical promise to the American people still flicker? Indeed, for the next sixty years an intriguing cohort of American explorers would discover in the pueblos, or imagine there, the deep spiritual allure of biblical antiquity converging with American history. Among the Pueblo Indians, they found an elixir for their discontent with the world of modernity they yearned to escape, a source of inspiration for their Edenic fantasies of regeneration. (6)

In traveling to New Mexico, many Westerners believed they were returning to their origins where they could cast off the modern world and begin life anew. Harold P. Simonson articulates Frederick Jackson Turner's claim that this return to beginnings offered subsequent human progress: “[T]he frontier allowed a brief exposure to primitivism as if this return to ancestral well-springs offered the psychic charge needed to thrust the evolutionary process even higher. Turner saw the frontier as a microcosm where man's history from primitivism to civilization would be reenacted” (44). New Mexico, then, symbolized a theater in which to enact the American Dream of starting over in order to progress further.

In addition to benefiting from New Mexican natives and Hispanics, the nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Westerner often profited from claims to knowledge of New Mexico's landscape. Some Western claims to knowledge ignored or denied local history altogether in order to place the traveling Westerner in the subjective interpretive space of wilderness.