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Both Hispanics and Anglos represent Western understandings of reality—understandings based on unequal power relations between West and Other. Although Hispanics have been viewed as Others since the Anglo colonization of the American west, my focus on New Mexican natives is restricted to Native Americans.
Western history asserts itself in travel and encounter narratives at the expense of native stories in order to justify colonization. Leslie Marmon Silko tells of enforced erasure of Native American stories in 1540, when Bishop Landa destroyed the Mayan and Aztec codices written in folding books because “Europeans were anxious to be rid of all evidence that Native American cultures were intellectually equal to European cultures; they could then argue to the pope that these indigenous inhabitants were not fully human and that Europeans were therefore free to do with them and their land as they pleased” (“Introduction” 21). After erasing native stories, the West filled in the narrative gaps with its own stories.
Colonialist travel literature, for most critics, is either literature of tourism, in which the Western traveler writes to a home audience and plans to return home, or of colonial expansion. In either case, the Western traveler writes of the place traveled to in the language of the West, thereby distorting the lens through which her home audience views the place. For this reason, the story of the Other is subsumed in order to enforce the hegemonic travel narrative that Western readers have come to expect—a narrative in which the “exotic” and “uncivilized” place traveled to teaches the Western traveler that she is more civilized than the Other who lives there or that the Other is desperately in need of Western guidance and rule. Most mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century travel writing is thus a colonial performance in which the white body of knowledge comes to know itself in its difference from the Other, as represented by the Western travel writer. The West has authorized this difference in travel accounts