Readings in Place: Recent Publications in Southwestern Literature and Studies

Culture in the Marketplace: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest. By Molly H. Mullin. Duke University Press, 2001.

Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region. By Audrey Goodman. University of Arizona Press, 2002.

Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film. By J. Douglas Canfield. University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Desert Southwest. By David N. Cassuto. University of Michigan Press, 2001.

Defining the region known as the Southwest is a project that keeps many geographers pleasantly and securely employed. As D. W. Meinig famously quipped, "The Southwest is a distinctive place to the American mind but a somewhat blurred place on American maps, which is to say that everyone knows that there is a Southwest but there is little agreement as to just where it is" (3). In spite of the great variability, complexity, and subjectivity of definitions geographers promulgate, however, when one distills the matter the region is nearly always defined along the intersection of two axes, one cultural and the other natural.

Certain characteristics of these two axes are obvious in the six works considered here. Culturally, the region is most distinguished from the rest of the US by the existence of two enduring ethnic communities, the indigenous and the Hispanic, with the presence of the Mexican border exerting a powerful influence. In very different ways, Molly H. Mullin's Culture in the Market Place: Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest, Audrey Goodman's Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region, and J. Douglas Canfield's Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film address themselves to the influence of these indigenous and Hispano-Mexican communities and, especially, to the cultural and symbolic function they serve for their Anglo neighbors.

On the natural axis, aridity is the inescapable fact of life. Most of the region receives between four and sixteen inches of rain a year. Aridity—efforts to adapt to it and attempts to overcome it—underlies much of the region's politics and culture. Aridity generates most of the region's other distinctive natural characteristics as well, such asthe unique flora and fauna, the stark ruggedness of the mountains, the dramatic visibility of the geologic strata, even the character of the light that so enamors artists. David N. Cassuto's Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Desert Southwest, Scott Slovic's edited collection Getting Over the Color Green: Contemporary Environmental Literature of the Southwest, and Ellen Meloy's The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest are all, in their different ways, considerations of aridity and its cultural and natural implications.

Santa Fe is both a town and a synecdoche for a regionally defining cultural style. Though the town takes pains to preserve its authenticity, debunking it has become almost a cliché in cultural studies. Santa Fe presents an easy target. It's a wondrous nexus of the authentic and the hokey, of the ancient, indigenous, and intriguingly vernacular with the faddish, exotic, and appallingly kitschy. As one of the oldest European communities in North America, founded in 1609, situated near some of the oldest continuously inhabited Native American communities, the Rio Grande Pueblos, Santa Fe can make a legitimate claim to an enduring integrity. Yet there is something artificial about its authenticity, something too calculated about its tastefulness, as though it were a sort of southwestern Williamsburg, inauthentic precisely because of its efforts to fossilize its authenticity.

However, while deconstructing and disparaging Santa Fe has become a delightful subspecialty for cultural studies scholars, it is a process that remains quite irrelevant to most of the town's residents and visitors. Mullin's Culture in the Marketplace explores this chasm between the scholarly critique, and the popular embrace, of Santa Fe's culture. (The book's subtitle uses the term "Southwest...