| Chapter 1: | New Mexico's Genesis as Symbolic Landscape |
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For the mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Western traveler, New Mexico represented the order and tradition that seemed to be disintegrating in the modern industrial world of the American east and of Europe. Many Westerners traveled to New Mexico in order to experience an older, pre-industrial time in which people respected and depended on tradition and order and existed as a part of the land rather than as an adversary to the land. New Mexico's Native American and Hispanic cultures were viewed as models of such order and tradition by many Euro-Americans and Europeans.
William De Buys describes the Western view of Pueblos as imagined models of stability in their respect for order and tradition. De Buys suggests that New Mexico's land is a reliable foundation for society as the “land and sky were living things which the Pueblo people supplicated through elaborate ritual to ensure the orderly progression of the seasons and the stability of their communities” (9). Whereas modern industry and progress was disillusioning for many Westerners, the Pueblos, as imagined constructions, were models of stability and wholeness in both the land and the community. Jerold S. Auerbach articulates the Western need for imagining Native Americans as models of order and tradition:
However, in order for the Pueblos to represent wholeness for the Westerner, the Westerner had to define and essentialize them. In other words, the Westerner must claim to know the Pueblos in order to make the Pueblos useful to her.
Jacquetta Hawkes and J. B. Priestley demonstrate this Western claim to knowledge in Journey Down a Rainbow: “[T]he modern Pueblos, a