Travel Narratives from New Mexico: Reconstructing Identity and T ...

New Mexico has been represented by the West in the language of the West, so the West has had only an imagined understanding of New Mexico's cultures. In order to better represent New Mexico's communities, it is necessary to revisit New Mexico's history and re-imagine the stories that compete to tell it. History is not a stable narrative of the past, but a fluid collection of competing narratives that continues to change and expand as it is revisited. Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Mabel Dodge Luhan's Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality, Kate Horsley's Crazy Woman, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony imagine and re-imagine New Mexico during one of its most dynamic shifts in identity: from the mid-nineteenth century, when the United States conquered Mexico and made New Mexico a U.S. territory, to the mid-twentieth century, when the Native American literary renaissance began. In the first three works, the West travels to the New Mexican native and represents her, and in the fourth work, the Native American responds by writing back to Western constructions of natives. In writing back, New Mexican natives represent themselves and thereby subvert Western authority.

It is important to note that although Hispanics may be viewed as natives in New Mexico, at least in relation to Anglos, they were the first community to colonize New Mexico, using Native Americans as forced labor and imposing Spanish worldviews upon them. Hispanics, like Anglos, have tried to change Native American epistemologies and ontologies to fit within Western constructs of reality. This study does not focus on Hispanics as New Mexican natives because, as David Caffey notes, their relationship with Anglos is not one of assimilation, as the Anglo/Native American and Hispanic/Native American relationships are: