Old Southwest/New Southwest: Essays on a Region and Its Literature ed. by Judy Lensink (review)

86Rocky Mountain Review Meanwhile, readable as it is, the greatest utility of Prophetic Woman — and it is a large one — may be to win new students to the field of Early American Literature. CAROL MARIE BENSICK University of Oregon JUDY LENSINK, ed. Old Southwest/New Southwest: Essays on a Region and Its Literature. Tucson: Tucson Public Libraries, 1987. 167 p. Last year in the county in which I live, there was a close race for sheriff. One of the things always said about the election was that the Republican candidate — if elected — would be the first Republican sheriff in the county since Pat Garrett. And obviously everyone loved to point this out because it lifted a humdrum election no one was too interested in onto the level of myth and legend. The West and Southwest have been such a potent source of material for folklore, for literature, and of course for the cinema that the people, the places, and the very landscape can seem overrepresented, already the subject of a thousand cliches. And if this is a fact anyone living in the Southwest comes to notice, whether running for sheriff or not, it bears with especial force on those writing in and about the area: what stance does one take toward those potent images that prestructure our understanding of the landscape and region? This question is the organizing theme of the interesting and important collection of essays edited by Judy Lensink, Old Southwest/New Southwest. Almost all of the essays were originally given at a conference with the same title held at Tucson in 1985, and the sixteen contributors include some of the best known contemporary Southwestern writers as well as critics and scholars of Southwestern literature, history, and culture. And though probably sixteen different definitions of the Southwest emerge from the sixteen essays, some assumptions are shared. First, everyone agrees that the images of the old Southwest are — at least partially and perhaps largely — false ones, and the task of the serious Southwestern writer today is largely a demythologizing one, opposing the "truth" to these older stereotypes. In "The Failure of Western Literature," William Eastlake refers to the "false myth" of the West, and other writers attempt in their pieces to dislodge some of that myth. In "Roots and Literary Influences ," Frank Waters discusses his attempt across the years to debunk the Wyatt Earp myth; David Lavender does some new debunking in "The Tyranny of Facts," criticizing the misrepresentations found in Willa Cather's Death Comesfor the Archbishop and Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. All four essays by Chícanos focus on ways Chícanos have been misrepresented or left out altogether. Perhaps the most substantial of these is Juan Garcia's "Hollywood and the West: Mexican Images in American Films," which discusses the persistent stereotyping of Mexicans in film from "Zorro to Zoot Suits." Thus these essays both demythologize and urge a broader demythologizing , a critical look at the received image of the Southwest. Yet there is an important divide between these essays that no one seems quite aware of. For all these writers, the Southwest isn't the land of "poco tiempo" but is a zone of conflict. But the conflicts they describe are Book Reviews87 revealingly different. John Nichols, for instance, predictably blasts the capitalist system in "The Writer as Revolutionary" for the ecological damage it is inflicting on the Southwest. His vision of the Southwest, shared by other contributors , is the Southwest as nature, as desert and mountains, and the struggle in the Southwest is between man and nature, or between those who want to exploit nature and those who want to let her alone. A quite different sense of struggle comes from Rudolfo Anaya's "A Chicano in King Arthur's Court," a conflict between those people indigenous to the area, Native Americans and Chícanos, and the Anglos who hold social, economic, and cultural power in the region. In the one vision, largely held by Anglos, the Southwest is where one encounters nature; in the other, largely held by Chícanos and Native Americans, it is where one encounters cultural difference, which often means cultural conflict. One could quibble with aspects of...