THE RED LAND TO THE SOUTH: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico by James H. Cox (review)

Cox’s study examines “American Indian literature between 1920 and 1960, particularly novels, histories, and plays about Mexico and indigenous Mexican peoples, cultures, and histories” as a means of filling in a prominent gap in accounts of twentieth-century Native American literature (1). His chapters focus on Todd Downing’s series of mystery/detective novels set in Mexico, along with that author’s non-fiction history of indigenous Mexico, The Mexican Earth (2005); Rollie Lynn Riggs’ two plays about indigenous revolt in Mexico, A World Elsewhere (1935) and The Year of Pilár (1938); D’Arcy McNickle’s novel The Runner in the Sun (1954), set in the pre-Hispanic Southwest; and—as a means of looking at the legacy of the forty-year period which is this study’s central concern—Gerald Vizenor’s and Leslie Marmon Silko’s quincentennial works and the relevance to them of a “return to Mexico.” For these authors, Cox argues, Mexico—with its promise of “indigenous strength, cultural cohesion, and potentially transformative political power” (5)—models a range of alluring possibilities for socio-political revolution both at home and abroad, as well as the reconfiguration of transnational identities and the imagination of a so-called Greater Indian Territory.

Cox offers rich contextual frames for the individual works he considers, placing them in relation to a range of interpretations of Mexican history and claims to indigenous solidarity, as well as to his chosen authors’ personal relationship with tribal, American, and international politics. The study’s five main chapters offer comprehensive assessments of extant scholarship in the field (and, of course, its deficiencies). Cox clearly demonstrates the imaginative power of Mexico during a neglected period of Native American literary history and convincingly argues—against a now well-entrenched convention—for continuities between that period and the succeeding civil rights and renaissance eras. Differences in tribal, American, and Mexican attitudes toward definitions of indigenous status, the potential of revolutionary violence, and the basis for indigenous allegiances are expertly assessed throughout the study, as are the various philosophical and political intersections between his focal authors and prominent cultural figures (most notably, Will Rogers, whose career as a diplomat receives extended treatment). Among the most important contributions here is the recovery of the (incisive but largely forgotten) work of Downing, whose novels, and their narratives of contemporary indigeneity, were commercially successful in the 1930s and 1940s but have received very little critical interest, and whose history of Mexico startlingly anticipates much of the revisionary non-fiction of the renaissance era.

The Red Land to the South represents a significant contribution to recent transnational studies of Mexico, and it persuasively makes the case that the four decades of literary history it considers are, indeed, “more literarily and politically robust than conventional American Indian literary history tells us” (203).