| Chapter 1: | New Mexico's Genesis as Symbolic Landscape |
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“reading of the linguistic signifier, which suggests that meaning is not inherent in words or things but comes about in social and contextual negotiations and differences” (204). In other words, “things don’t mean in themselves; they mean according to contexts” (205). New Mexico, for Euro-American and European travelers, has meaning only according to Western knowledge claims.
In Western contexts or knowledge claims, New Mexico is the “land of enchantment.” It has meaning in its difference from the American east and from Europe. With its high mesas—striated in testimony to geological forces and time—its iron-red canyons, its granite cliffs, its seemingly endless space, and its heterogeneous Hispanic, Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, and Anglo populations, New Mexico is unlike the American east. Under a Western lens, New Mexico is a site where the past is still being played out.
Early Euro-American and European travelers often viewed New Mexico as a retreat from modernity. Conrad Eugene Ostwalt, Jr., points out in After Eden that “Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…had lost their familiar world and were searching for legitimacy in a new, meaningful environment” (112). Ostwalt continues, “[t]hese Americans were precariously situated between the comfortable agrarian world of their roots and the industrial modern world of anonymity” (113). Their “comfortable world” was not that of industry but of their agricultural past, in which they were a part of a community rather than apart from community.
Whereas the mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century landscape of the American East was being hacked through to make way for industry and economic expansion, New Mexico was seen by Euro-Americans and Europeans as a place mostly unscarred by Western progress. The past appeared to be present in New Mexico, a land seemingly untouched by industry. Russel D. Butcher writes in New Mexico: Gift of the Earth, “[a]fter these many centuries of human settlement New Mexico is still one of the least spoiled, most unusual places in the world” (113). Harvey Fergusson notes in Rio Grande that New Mexico seems frozen in the past as “the face of the earth is not much altered” (8). Much of New Mexico looks the same as it did to the first Spanish explorers. Sheep still