The Red Land to the South: American Indian Literature and Indigenous Mexico by James H. Cox (review)

In response to Craig S. Womack’s question: “How do Indians view Indians?” James H. Cox’s The Red Land to the South: American Indian Literature and Indigenous Mexico, published in 2012, offers a timely and complex look at how American Indian writers of the interwar and contemporary periods were influenced by the histories and cultures of indigenous Mexicans (quoted in Cox, 22). Cox not only contributes to an understudied period in American Indian Studies, the period of the 1920s through the 1960s, but also contributes to a growing conversation about transnational and comparative indigeneities.

The Red Land to the South takes as its primary focus the writings of Todd Downing (Choctaw), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), D’arcy McNickle (Salish and Kootenai), Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) among other American Indian writers such as John Joseph Mathews (Osage) and Will Rogers (Cherokee). For the interwar writers such as Downing, Riggs, and McNickle, Cox convincingly argues that their work was influenced by their travels within Mexico and by the political promise that a majority indigenous presence in Mexico represented. Cox demonstrates how their work, often characterized by a sense of diplomacy as well as respect for indigenous Mexican revolutionary politics and practices, anticipates the politics and alliances of the Red Power movement and its corresponding literature. Taken together with the works by Vizenor and Silko, Cox posits that the texts contribute to a Greater Indian Territory imaginary, one that foregrounds relationships between tribal-nations and is attuned to settler-colonial nation-state realities.

As a book firmly rooted in American Indian Studies, Cox offers tribal-specific readings of texts and connects the writers’ literary practices with their diverse forms of political activism. Cox enriches his study with archival work that highlights primary source documents such as authors’ letters, book reviews and reprints, and other cultural artifacts that attest in particular to American Indians’ active presence within the cultural and political spheres of the interwar period through the 1950s.

In the first chapter, Cox argues that Downing’s prolific body of work has been neglected because of the popular genre he chose to write in, the detective novel, but also because of Downing’s focus on Mexico. Cox identifies in Downing’s work a consistent thread that exposes a lingering colonial presence, U.S. neocolonialism, and indigenous Mexican resistance to the Mexican settler nation-state. Through close readings of The Cat Screams (1934), Cox further situates Downing’s work within the American Indian literary tradition as the text’s narrative ending points to the vital role of religious practices in maintaining indigenous identities and resistance. In chapter two, Cox turns to Lynn Riggs’ Mexico plays, A World Elsewhere (ca. 1934-1937) and The Year of Pilar (ca. 1935-1938). Cox begins the chapter by highlighting the Cherokee presence in Riggs’ early works, Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) and The Cherokee Night (ca. 1931), to underscore Riggs’ Greater Indian Territory underpinning his work. Through close readings of the Mexico plays and their influence on Riggs’ later work, The Cream in the Well (1940), Cox convincingly argues that the Mexico plays represent a shift in Riggs’ work: Mexico enables Riggs “to imagine a more politically outraged Cherokee and a more explicit critique of U.S. Indian and imperial policy” (104). In Chapter Three, Cox returns to Downing, focusing on The Mexican Earth (1940), a history of Mexico. Cox situates the text within an active non-fiction literary scene and practice of American Indian diplomacy, through an examination of works by Will Rogers, Luther Standing Bear, and John Joseph Mathews. He claims that The Mexican Earth contests dominant narratives of Mexican history to highlight a continuous history of Native presence and anti-imperial resistance. In Chapter Four, Cox offers a close reading of D’arcy McNickle’s novel Runner in the Sun: A Story of...