| Chapter 1: | New Mexico's Genesis as Symbolic Landscape |
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Mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Euro-Americans and Europeans imagined a New Mexico that differed greatly from the New Mexico that local natives and Hispanics knew. In 1884 Charles F. Lummis visited New Mexico pueblos and found them to be “the enduring repository of national virtue, miraculously still intact amid the sordid corruption of modernity” as the Pueblo natives held onto “older” customs, unlike modern-day Easterners, and reminded him of the ancient Israelites (Auerbach 53). In this way, Lummis popularized New Mexico as a “land of enchantment,” as he writes in his Letters (qtd. in Auerbach 53). Auerbach notes that Lummis, “[w]ith his popular essays and books,” such as The Land of Poco Tiempo, “brashly took credit for having ‘christened the Southwest’” (54).
Of course, the southwest had been peopled with diverse Navajo, Apache, Pueblo, and Hispanic cultures for years before Lummis “discovered” it. In Western metaphysics, however, a place does not exist for the West, which claims authority of knowledge, until it is spoken into being by the West. Bruce Robert Greenfield argues that the American discovery narrative was “particularly germane to the Euro-American identity” because it supported Western authority over unfamiliar places; thus, Euro-American and European travelers were “privileged as sources of knowledge” (11). Their accounts of any unfamiliar place were authoritative because native and local accounts were not readily available to the Euro-Americans and Europeans. Western readers (Euro-Americans and Europeans) knew New Mexico by the Anglo West's travel accounts of it.
Anglos have known New Mexico as an unfallen civilization and a New Eden since 1879, when Frank H. Cushing arrived near Zuni, New Mexico, and witnessed Zuni women returning from a well with clay jars on their heads (Auerbach 4–5). Auerbach writes, “[f]rom Zuni emerged the mythical Southwest as an Edenic alternative to Gilded Age America” (43). Curtis Hinsley explains in “Zunis and Brahmins” that New Mexico, as an Edenic paradise, is an imaginative construct: “In their imagined idyllic community, which bore little resemblance to the complex reality of Zuñi Pueblo, disaffected Americans passionately wanted to believe that they had discovered the elixir for their discontent with American