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As other voices add to the dominant narrative of history, which reduces reality to a stable cultural frame, it becomes clear that history and identity are always in flux. Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Dodge's Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, Horsley's Crazy Woman, and Silko's Ceremony demonstrate history's instability as they move, in sequential order of examination, from colonialist transmission to romanticizing through essentialization and on to historical revisionism with both a Western re-imagining of history and local counter-discursive strategies. This collection of narratives traces the enforcement of and resistance to the Western myth of the Euro-American and European as normative and the Hispanic and the native as Other.
The first chapter of this study examines how meaning has been constructed in Western travel to New Mexico. To most mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Euro-Americans and Europeans, New Mexico represented a retreat from modernity and a cure for the modern temperament. The West saw the past being played out in New Mexico, and the West viewed natives as a stable model of order and tradition. Further, many Euro-Americans and Europeans imagined New Mexico as a wilderness in which they could recreate themselves as questing heroes. Such constructs of meaning not only overwrite or ignore New Mexico's history of native, Spanish, and Mexican settlement, conflict, and negotiation but they also fail to acknowledge progress in New Mexico.
In chapter 2, I discuss Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Bishop Jean Marie Latour, Cather's protagonist, transmits European claims to knowledge from Rome to New Mexico and thereby reinforces his identity through travel to New Mexico. He sees New Mexico as a wilderness in which the land and people need his colonizing influence in order to save them. Latour represents the archetypal colonialist whose mission is to civilize the native. Cather demonstrates Anglo superiority as her narrative moves from “civilized” Rome to “uncivilized” New Mexico. Indeed, the purpose of Latour's and Father Joseph Vaillant's journey is to make New Mexico more like the civilized West.
Chapter 3 demonstrates that Mabel Dodge Luhan, in Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, creates a new identity by appropriating