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  • Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico by James H. Cox
  • Kristian Jensen (bio)
Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico. James H. Cox. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 288 pages. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

In Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico, James H. Cox analyzes mid-twentieth-century American Indian novels, plays, and histories that center on indigenous Mexico. Cox’s thorough historical, biographical, and cultural contextualization firmly grounds his analysis of these authors’ southward gaze. Critics of American Indian literature, with some exceptions, have previously described these authors as isolated and passive. Cox counters, however, that the literary production of Todd Downing (Choctaw), Rollie Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D’Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish and Kootenai), among others, “coheres in its contemplation of the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of the settler-colonial nation on the other side of the United States’ … southern border” (2).

Adopting Rachel Adams’s concept of “indigenous transnationalism” (20), Cox explicates the imaginary global reconfiguring these authors undertake. “By mapping an indigenous American world that existed prior to the colonial era and that continues to span settler-colonial national borders,” he asserts, “these authors produce an indigenous American transnational or transborder imaginary” (19). Cox points out that, for Downing, Riggs, and McNickle, Mexico is a model of political and cultural revolutionary transformation. Because indigenous Mexicans far outnumber American Indians, these writers “optimistically, but at times inaccurately, represented this overflow of indigeneity to a U.S. audience as a powerful cultural and political force in Mexico” (8). Red Land to the South persuasively advocates for a more prominent place for mid-twentieth-century authors in the American Indian literary canon.

Cox contends that Downing’s detective novels mark Mexico as a site of “neocolonial invasion” by Americans—criminals, tourists, and journalists—and as a vital center of indigenous resistance (27). His often overlooked transnational novels merit recognition as integral works within “Choctaw literary history, an American Indian literature of Oklahoma tradition, and a twentieth-century American Indian literary history where [they] properly belong” (34). This omission, Cox explains, stems from critical standards that exclude American Indian literary works not centered on American Indian identity and cultural traditions, even though some of Downing’s novels actually do fit these criteria. Downing appropriates and [End Page 177] refigures the early twentieth-century Mexican discourse of indigenismo, which reconstituted Mexican identity by co-opting and obscuring indigenous identity to “[force] Native voices, beliefs, and bodies into the conversation” (42). Ultimately, these detective novels, especially The Cat Screams (1934), counter stereotypical images of violent indigenes with indigenous red herrings that reveal European and white American villains. Cox also considers the related theme of Mexico as a metaphor for unfulfilled desire in novels of Native religious revitalization by Downing’s contemporaries, including John M. Oskison and McNickle.

Moving beyond fiction, Cox highlights the parallel critiques of assimilation in Downing’s history The Mexican Earth (1940) and Luther Standing Bear’s Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933). In contrast to these authors, however, Downing presents an “indigenous-centric” (134) literary method that “celebrates Mexico as an unconquered geography of indigenous communities” (135-36): “Downing highlights the diverse histories, worldviews, and landscapes that define indigenous nations, privileges tribal specificity in a reading of the histories of the Americas, and encourages indigenous solidarity against colonial dominance” (109). Arguing that indigenous Mexico will eventually become an extension of indigenous Americans’ shared political struggle, Cox reads Downing’s work as “establish[ing] a kinship between all indigenous American people” (109).

According to Cox, McNickle likewise advocates an indigenous kinship between Mexico and America and depicts transnational indigenous diplomacy in his novel Runner in the Sun (1954). The novel imagines revived American Indian nations during the US termination policies of the mid-1940s to mid-1960s, when the government revoked its previous recognition of American Indian sovereign nations. Like his contemporaries, McNickle appropriates Mexican indigenismo and includes “an equally emphatic assertion of autonomous indigenous political expression” (157). Transnational indigenous kinship, represented by the trans-indigenous symbol of corn, serves to counter colonialist political, religious, and cultural forms...

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