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

blankets or cotton sheets covering the sidewalks. In the plazas of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos, tourists see natives making jewelry, weaving rugs with looms, and polishing stone representations of both natural and otherworldly creatures. In such places, tourists often feel that they have traveled back in time. By imagining such travel, Westerners might believe they are living the American Dream of starting over.

In starting over, romantic and modern Western travelers felt they could escape the unfulfilling Western progress of industry and the separation from an imagined “time before.” Travel could be a panacea for Westerners who wished to leave their modern lives and experience the past as they imagined it to be. Pico Iyer claims, “[t]raveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time” (145). Judith Adler explains that “travel constructs a world of its participants” who represent the “trip as a search for a vantage point from which to grasp and understand life ‘as it really is’” in their “search for direct experience of another time through change of place” (1375). An imagined “real life” was important to mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Euro-Americans and Europeans whose identities were fractured by a modern temperament in which “[a] fundamental dissociation of sensibility, a breakdown of cultural expression, had set in. The world was uprooted, the image had lost its coherence, thought and feeling had separated, the symbol no longer had its transcendence, or the poem its meaning” (Bradbury 8). Ezra Pound writes that the modernism from which people suffered “took place somewhere between the 1870s and the outbreak of the Second World War” (qtd. in Bradbury 5). In this time, Friedrich Nietzsche had declared that “God is Dead” (343); Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species, had “proposed a theory of evolution in the natural world itself, and questioned the Christian view of creation at its core. These new sociological and scientific views, these secular accounts of nature and history, challenged the old theocentric and romantic vision” (Bradbury 10). In short, the zeitgeist of the modern age was, as W. B. Yeats writes, “[t]hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (3). It was to recover this center that the Western traveler came to New Mexico.