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

peaceful sedentary people who have never moved from their ancestral lands, still preserve much of their ancient culture… They are still living more or less as they always did, and, in spite of the assaults of Western civilization, still offer us insights into prehistoric ways” (xii). Such insights brought the Western traveler in touch with an imagined past in which order and tradition offered wholeness, whereas modernity offered a seemingly unfulfilling separation from community and nature. Mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century New Mexico offered the Westerner encounters not only with Pueblos and other Native Americans but with Hispanics as well. If order and tradition could be observed in the Pueblos, could not order and tradition also be seen in Hispanics?

Spanish Americans, the first to colonize New Mexico after Native Americans, brought with them Spanish customs and traditions which many Anglos believed stayed intact after the Spanish settled in New Mexico. John Brinckerhoff Jackson observes the continuation of Spanish order in colonial New Mexico: “Settlement in colonial New Mexico was in effect a transplantation, a new version of the order that had prevailed in colonial Mexico and Spain” (19). Jackson describes the Spanish who colonized New Mexico as “homogenous groups of simple people who brought with them their religion, their family ties, their ways of building and working and farming” (19). It is telling that Jackson essentializes the colonizing Spanish because such essentialization feeds into imaginative constructions of non-Anglo races and how they are incapable or unwilling to progress as Western Anglo civilization—another imagined community—progresses. The irony here is that many mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Westerners longed to “regress” in order to relive an ordered past in which they imagined the Other to be living. One Western observer in 1940 notes that the “country people of Spanish descent…forming tiny hamlets, live now much as their forebears have lived for the past two or three centuries” (Writer's Program 7). In essentializing New Mexico's populations, the Western traveler claimed to know them. The Western traveler then had the power to control New Mexico's people by exploiting their seemingly primitive ways and appropriating those ways for herself or himself, thus profiting from travel to New Mexico.