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

James H. Cox’s The Red Land to the South is a significant contribution to Native American and Indigenous studies and will be of great interest to scholars of western American literatures. This fascinating book expands western American studies in two key ways: first, as the title suggests, Cox looks to Mexico, analyzing how Native American authors have imagined Indigeneity south of the US border; second, Cox offers a trenchant analysis of overlooked and understudied Native authors writing between 1920 and 1960, a period often imagined as a glaring absence in Native literary history. The introduction sketches out the varying definitions of Indigeneity in the United States and Mexico, while also offering an overview of the representations of Indigenous Mexico in US literary history. Cox cites a long record of ties between Indigenous peoples in the United States and Mexico, as evidenced in early written histories and tribal origin stories that narrate migrations north from Mexico. In this chronicle of representation, which moves from such origin stories to late-twentieth-century literature, Cox situates the Native authors he considers in greatest detail over the course of his analysis: the midcentury writers Todd Downing (Choctaw), Rollie Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D’Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish/Kootenai) and the post-Renaissance writers Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) and Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe).

In his first chapter, “Dreadful Armies: Indigenistas and Other Criminals in Todd Downing’s Detective Novels,” Cox recovers the work of novelist Todd Downing, who wrote an impressive ten novels between 1933 and 1945. Though little known now, in the 1930s and 1940s Downing achieved a high level of success. Cox suggests that the scholarly amnesia surrounding this important body of work can be attributed to Downing’s attention to the Indigenous people of Mexico, as well as to the fact that Downing’s Native characters and plots fail to meet critics’ desires for a requisite “quest for identity” (33, 34). Focusing the majority of his analysis on The Cat Screams (1934), Cox shows how Downing crafts Indigenous Mexican people as active proponents of anticolonial resistance who employ and maintain Native language and spiritual practices in the face of settler colonial incursion.

Cox considers Riggs’s A World Elsewhere (1934–37) and The Year of Pilár (1935–38) in his second chapter. Riggs, who, like Downing, published prolifically in the mid-twentieth century, both wrote and set these plays in Mexico. However, rather than being distinct from his Indian territory plays, Cox argues, these texts extend the interest in tribal geographies that pervades Riggs’s oeuvre. To make this case Cox shows that Riggs’s Indian Territory plays delineate the key aspects of his geographic imaginary, which includes attention to the boundaries of dysfunctional families, as well as to histories of dispossession and settler violence. By contrast Riggs’s Mexico incorporates recognizably Indigenous characters, who, as opposed to mourning the land loss, successfully stage resistance and land redistribution. Cox undoubtedly shifts our understanding of Riggs’s textual legacy by highlighting the radical potential of Riggs’s Indigenous Mexico.

Chapter 3 further extends our understanding of mid-twentieth-century texts by considering nonfiction by a number of midcentury Native writers including Will Rogers, Luther Standing Bear, John Joseph Mathews, Downing, and John Oskison. Cox focuses on the careful diplomacy of their texts, arguing that this body of work prefigures the politics and literature of the Red Power era. In his section on Downing’s book-length history, The Mexican Earth (1940), Cox charts Downing’s articulation of a radical transnational, or what Chadwick Allen might term “trans-Indigenous,” ethos in which Native peoples are “residents of a shared homeland, the southern part of which is in the midst of enduring indigenous revolution” (147).

In chapters 4 and 5 of his study Cox returns to fiction, first considering D’Arcy McNickle’s 1954 Runner in the Sun—in which Indigenous community and kinship precede...