The Haunted Southwest

Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature

Cordelia E. Barrera

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781682831328
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the American Southwest, Hispano, Indian, and Euro-American cultures display conflicting and competing avenues for legitimacy. Examining literature of the region, The Haunted Southwest makes use of theories of place, space, and haunting to show how memory instills an ethic and orientation tied to embodied knowledge.

American modernist ideologies accelerated the erasure of indigenous histories and ways of being-in-the-world. The Haunted Southwest digs under spatial geography to expose sites where colonial and colonized cultures intersect and overlay to create a palimpsest haunted by history. These sites emerge as environments of memory—places of synthesis and renewal for indigenous and mestiza/o subjects.

Pressing the need to disturb narratives within the "bordered frontier" foregrounds a moral imperative for place-making in the US-Mexico Borderlands. In this way, this book situates region and place as generative sites of ideology and ethnic identity that more broadly signify sustainable practices on the Borderlands. A primary goal is to demonstrate how a focus on the political and social forces of haunting embeds a moral and ethical framework that speaks to our most pressing contemporary environmental and social justice concerns.

Through analysis and resituation of border rituals and celebrations, alongside works by Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others, author Cordelia E. Barrera argues that an eco-spatial poetics attuned to multivocality within postmodern narratives breaks open haunted sites and allows us to re-map landscapes as a repository of ancestral traces and on ethical grounds.

Introduction

I. Space: The Frontier as Origin Myth in the American Southwest

The story of the US–Mexico border has its origins in a frontier of exclusion, a frontier that existed solely in the interest of Euro American settlers.1 At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner first presented his now famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in which he confirmed the closing of the first period of American history: the end of the frontier. For Turner (1962), the so-called opening of the western landscape was a specifically white movement westward predicated on an “idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things” that could be found only in a vast, unsettled wilderness terrain (43). Turner lamented the vanished “free lands” of early, hearty pioneers, largely immigrants from Old World European countries such as Germany and Scandinavia who imagined a modern world, a “new order of society” (42, 44). He wrote:

[T]he fact is that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. . . . [T]he advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines (5).

In the Turnerian model, Euro Americans moved west with a mind towards what he called freedom of opportunity, liberty, social advancement, and “a resistance to the domination of class which infused a vitality and power into the individual atoms of this democratic mass” (43–44). For Turner, the country’s most effective social values were epitomized by a westward movement associated with democratic values. Turner, however, spoke only for whites—specifically white, middle-class men. More problematic is the fact that Turner based the “closing of the frontier” on 1890 census data that reflected a western population where most frontier land was comprised of individually owned property. He continues: “Up to our day, American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development” (1966[1893], 79). Because Turner’s language harmonized well with the faith in American exceptionalism, his conservative myth-making that this one causal force—the frontier—could explain American development as well as historical consciousness held sway for some time. Turner gave the frontier a national significance by adopting a certain terminology and point of view. This point of view, however, was entirely ethnocentric, as it viewed an intergroup contact situation from the vantage point of only one of the interested parties: Euro Americans. For Turner, the “most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land . . . the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (4).

By the twentieth century, New Western scholars like Richard White, Richard Slotkin, and Patricia Nelson Limerick explored the myth of the frontier, tracing its origins and evolution in terms of its narrative thrust and as a vehicle of cultural ideology. Limerick (1987), in her influential Legacy of Conquest, situates Turner’s frontier thesis as the “origin myth” of white America (322). The “burden” of Western American history, she contends, lies with a mythology that ignores some very basic facts about Western history. Most notable is the fact that the myth, this “tale . . . bears little resemblance to the events of the Western past” (323). The myth transforms the landscape as well as Europeans, now Americans:

Europe was crowded; North America was not. Land in Europe was claimed, owned and utilized; land in North America was available for the taking. . . . Europeans moved from crowded space to open space, where free land restored opportunity and offered a route to independence. Generation by generation, hardy pioneers, bringing civilization to displace savagery, took on a zone of wilderness, struggled until nature was mastered, and then moved on to the next zone. . . . [T]he result was a new nation and a new national character: the European transmuted into the American. Thrown on their own resources, pioneers recreated the social contract from scratch. . . . At the completion of the conquest, that chapter of history was closed. The frontier ended, but the hardiness and independence of the frontier survived in [the] American character (322–23, italics in original).

Limerick’s West is vast and far-reaching and includes the present-day states of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota. The West—this space that has historically undergone conquest and, in fact, yet grapples with the consequences of conquest—nonetheless begs a certain fluidity.2 Although the Turner thesis is the basis upon which much of early Western history rests, Turner’s model, as the origin myth of white Americans, obviously erases a significant portion of the players—most notably Native Americans and Mexicans who occupied vast expanses of the Western frontier prior to Euro American movement westward.

In writing about myth and historical memory, Slotkin (1985) argues that “a constellation of stories, fables, and images” (16) have organized historical memory in the American West. Slotkin’s Fatal Environment outlines an American historical narrative that takes place between 1800 and 1890, and so lies just outside the scope of the present study. I turn to Slotkin here for his focus on the metaphorical language and formal qualities and structures of myths as symbolizing functions key to understanding the culture that produces them. Slotkin, who continues his study of the frontier myth in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, writes:

The myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this myth-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and “progressive” civilization (1992, 10).

Fatal Environment begins with the idea that a story, a frontier myth positioned to explain American identity and ideology, is firmly entrenched within an expansive Western landscape. He states that the “mythic space called the Frontier” is patterned by a historical sequence suffused with meaning in the form of a story that transforms landscape to symbol and historical temporality into “‘doom’—a fable of necessary and fated actions” (11). In this story, white settlers enlist and then index Native Americans across a broad spectrum of omnipresent danger, making the landscape “a place of great hazard and disarray which they have been heroic enough to have brought into order” (R. White 1991, 618). Accordingly, The Haunted Southwest breaks open the meanings behind the fated actions that have shaped the stories and landscapes that pattern the frontier. More direct to my purpose in situating the frontier myth as a function of Euro American expansionist aims and storytelling in the Southwest, Slotkin, like Limerick, lays a firm foundation for deciphering Turner’s language, specifically Turner’s use of the frontier from the mid-1890s and onward. Slotkin (1985) argues that the myth of the frontier “was developed by and for an America that was a colonial offshoot of Europe, agrarian in economy, localistic in politics, tentative as to nationality, and relatively homogenous in ethnicity, language, and religion” (15). Further, Slotkin expands our understanding of how the myth further shaped early Euro Americans’ response to Western industrialization and imperial expansion.

In Frontier Gothic, the myth is described as a “creation myth” that crafts a “Golden Age out of a vexed and complex heritage, artificially dislocating the present from the past” by viewing it with a time-fracturing nostalgia (1992, 19). As regards Turner’s paradigm, editors Mogen, Sanders, and Karpinski consider how the myth serves as a nexus that guides the means by which Americans both romanticize their heritage and distance themselves from it. The moral failings that result from such distancing are evident in the fiction of Arturo Islas, Cormac McCarthy, Américo Paredes, and Larry McMurtry, as described herein. In Limerick’s (1987) careful examination, the West’s “moral burden” is comparable to that of the South, as is evidenced by the lingering injustice that an invading and conquering people did and still impose on a native population. This moral failure is a result of competition for land and natural resources as well as a struggle for cultural dominance (27). I turn to Limerick here because she writes from a decidedly ecological and multicultural point of view to show how historians have failed to understand the environmental limits of the land itself. Additionally, she situates her rewriting of Western history with an eye towards place and place-making that deemphasizes Turner’s “migratory, abstract” (26) frontier as process, as well as history based on a “frontier of exclusion” (226). Accordingly, Limerick contrasts a Euro American vision with a Spanish vision, theorizing that, along the Borderlands, “the Spanish might well have had a ‘frontier of inclusion’” that more readily and easily incorporated Indians into colonial society and economy (226).

Limerick, following David J. Weber (1998), further speaks to Turner’s imprecise and shifting use of the term “frontier.” Historian Kerwin Lee Klein (1997) concurs, commenting at length about “Turner’s professed disinterest in precise definition” (15). Sometimes, states Weber, Turner used the frontier “to represent a place, sometimes a process, and sometimes a condition” (34). Weber further recognizes that frontier zones impact cultures, institutions, and peoples quite differently, acknowledging that we must take into account motives on “both sides of a frontier” (41) This reminds us how Spanish Americans, as comparative historians tell us, attempted to assimilate Indigenous Americans rather than push them back or annihilate them as the English more generally did. Besides, in the American Southwest, even after 1848, writes Limerick, the Borderlands were “an ecological whole; northeastern Mexican desert blended into southwestern American desert with no prefigurings of nationalism. The one line that nature did provide—the Rio Grande—was a river that ran through but did not really divide continuous terrain” (222). Whereas the Spanish northern Borderlands of New Mexico served as a line of defense holding off Indian raiders as well as a strategic response to English and French imperial rivalry, Spanish colonization of Texas was a counter “chessboard” move against a French presence in the Mississippi Valley. Russian and English interest in California similarly provoked a Spanish countermove “extending the unwieldy unit of the borderlands” ever southward (227).3 This brief foray into the metaphoric thrust of the shape of the frontier as origin myth shapes a complex mythology rooted in history, symbols, and cultural values. Similarly, the “Southwest” refers not simply to geographical lines on a map but to a landscape that can be conceptualized in terms of space, place, and time in the historical as well as modern imagination.

In terms of the American Southwest as a distinct region, Eric Gary Anderson’s (1999) American Indian Literature and the Southwest makes clear “the need for a critical resituating of the Southwest” (195). Just as “southwestering narratives” cannot be bounded by any one single thesis (3), neither can we “bound” the peoples of the Southwest by a border or even a frontier for that matter. The Southwest is a region in constant motion, argues Anderson, and it is constantly moved through. Additionally, the Southwest as region functions as an active and complicated “convergence point that proves difficult to contain inside any one disciplinary or critical sphere” (4). For Anderson, the Southwest is a restless place of paradox where “alien, migratory cultures” have been encountering each other in competition for generations (3). Because the moves these “alien, migratory” peoples make are physical as well as metaphorical and metaphysical, his Southwestern boundary remains fluid and portable. Further, because historically and figuratively the Southwest is in constant motion, it must be defined from multiple, shifting points of view. In this light, the Southwest is a “complicated convergence point” where Euro American and American Indian cultures have, for generations, been migrating “against” each other (4, 5, italics in original).

I argue that critical regionalism is necessary to identify the forces that shape the frontier myth. This stratagem is described by José E. Limón (2008) as a theory and methodology by which to recognize, examine, and finally, foster localized identities in their cultural and socioeconomic fullness, especially as such stand antagonistically with burgeoning aspects of capitalism and later patterns of globalization. I discuss critical regionalism in conversation with a century-old performance in Laredo in chapter 2. I introduce the concept here as one way to inculcate the American Southwest as a distinct region that patterns a basic paradox entwined within the dualities of tradition (the past/place) and progress (the future/space)—a contradiction that plays out spatially, along a geographical axis, and temporally, in terms of historical processes.

Thus, the Southwest in which Anderson’s “alien” bodies are both produced by and reflect...

Table of contents

• 
Illustrations
• 
Prologue
• 
Preface
• 
Introduction
• 
Conclusion
• 
Epilogue
• 
Acknowledgments
• 
Appendix
• 
Notes
• 
Works Cited
• 
Index