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Article Excerpt
As Todd Downing led tourists from the United States through Mexico during the summers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he studied their views of Mexico and developed his own acute understanding of the Mexican land and its people. Downing incorporated this knowledge and experience into ten mystery novels and The Mexican Earth (1940), a history of indigenous Mexico and an unequivocal assertion of indigenous nationhood and anti-racist, anti-colonial nationalism disguised as a travelogue about modern Mexico. (1) Downing was born in Atoka in the Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, in 1902, and his interest in Mexico has its origins in his intellectual life in Norman at the University of Oklahoma, where Downing earned a BA in 1924 and an MA in 1928 with a thesis on the Uruguayan dramatist Florencio Sanchez. He also taught Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and reviewed books in Spanish and French for Books Abroad, which was founded at the University of Oklahoma and eventually renamed World Literature Today. In The Mexican Earth, which received a laudatory review from the archaeologist and historian Philip Ainsworth Means in the New York Times, Downing adopts an explicitly indigenous authorial perspective by identifying himself as Indian and narrating a map of the Americas that foregrounds an indigenous nation to indigenous nation relationship within Mexico and between Mexico and the United States. (2) Downing highlights the varied histories, worldviews, and landscapes that define indigenous nations, but also he emphasizes the shared experience of originating and continuously residing in the Americas that establishes and sustains a kinship between all indigenous American people. In a reading of the histories of the Americas he privileges tribal nation specificity and encourages indigenous solidarity against colonial dominance.
Downing's view of indigenous Mexico in The Mexican Earth anticipates late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century coalitions between indigenous people in the US and Mexico as well as the current disciplinary interest in American Indian literary nationalism, which encourages the foregrounding of indigenous creative and intellectual traditions in readings of indigenous literatures and histories. For example, in March of 2006, a month prior to the "Native American Literature: Nationalism and Beyond" conference sponsored by the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia, twenty-five citizens of the Hopi Nation ran 2,000 miles from Hopi to Anahuac, the Valley of Mexico, for the Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City. (3) The run was organized by the Black Mesa Trust, which was founded in 1999 to educate people about the devastating environmental impact of the Peabody Coal Company's daily pumping of millions of gallons of water from the Navajo Aquifer. (4) The runners, who ranged in age from twelve to seventy-five years, arrived at the Otomi Ceremonial Center in Temoaya and, then, completed their journey at Teotihuacan, a 2,000 year old urban center of Mesoamerica prior to the rise of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1325 CE. Roberto Rodriguez reports in the April 6, 2006 edition of Indian Country Today on the welcome that the Hopis received from their relatives throughout the journey and in Anahuac:
Everywhere they went, the runners were treated with utmost respect and great reverence, particularly the elders. Many of those with whom they met acknowledged that they are related and that the Hopi represent memory. The people do not need linguists, archaeologists or anthropologists to affirm this. The stories, the common languages, the water and the maize communicate this same message: San ce tojuan. Ti masehualme, okichike ka centeotzintli: We are one. We are macehual, made from sacred maize. (1)
This meeting of relatives only nominally separated by colonial borders illustrates at least two ways that indigenous peoples practice their nationhood in an international context: through a local movement that roots itself in an indigenous nation's land and worldview even as it travels between other native nations (Zuni, Isleta, Otomi) to a global conference on water policy, and through the recognition of indigenous nationhood by other indigenous nations. As a tour guide more than seventy years earlier, Downing traveled repeatedly a similar route to Mexico City as the Hopi runners, and in The Mexican Earth he models the same concern for the distinct histories of indigenous nations while acknowledging shared indigenous North American experiences.
The few scholars in Native American literary studies who comment on Downing's novels focus on the absence of explicit indigenous content. In these novels, eight of which were published for Doubleday, Doran's Crime Club between 1934 and 1941, Downing does not foreground indigenous nations, cultures, and histories, and most of the main characters are not indigenous. (5) Yet Downing uses the conventions of the mystery novel to condemn the pervasive criminality that characterizes the history of US and Mexican relations with indigenous Americans. The plots of Murder on Tour (1933) and The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (1936), for example, focus on the smuggling of indigenous Mexican human remains and artifacts and the murders committed to hide these crimes. Indigenous characters have secondary yet important roles in The Cat Screams (1934) and Vultures in the Sky (1935), and in both these novels, as in Night Over Mexico (1937), indigenous characters are victims of the neglect or premeditated violence of non-indigenous people. Thus, while a latently violent indigenous presence contributes to the sinister atmosphere in several of his novels, Downing subverts completely the view of indigenous people as dangerous primitives. With the exception of his final short novel, The Shadowless Hour (1945), in which a young indigenous man kills his mother's drug dealer and a zealous missionary, criminals in Downing's mysteries are always non-indigenous. Downing documents a contemporary crime wave in Mexico with origins in the United States and the enduring colonial practices of mistreating, exploiting, and killing indigenous people. The novels, therefore, provide an important preface to The Mexican Earth, in which Downing transforms a critique of colonial practices into an explicitly indigenous narrative about centuries of anti-colonial resistance.
Downing foregrounds an indigenous nation-to-nation or intertribal nation relationship with roots in the land. The title The Mexican Earth expresses the integral connection between indigenous nationhood and land tenure that Downing develops throughout the work. The book is not about a Mexico founded in colonial documents and validated by international law, treaty, or diplomacy, although Downing's argument is compatible with D'Arcy McNickle's position in Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals (1973) that there was loss but not defeat and that an always coherent, sovereign, and legally recognized indigenous presence can be traced from contact into the present. (6) Rather, the book concerns the Mexican land, or the land of the Mexicas (pronounced "Meshicas"), the self-identification of the Aztecs. (7) As Burr Cartwright Brundage explains, this name, Mexica, derives from a deity named Mecitli or Mexitli who told the group that rose to power in Anahuac to break from the rest of its people. Brundage believes that the translation of Mexitli is "the Maguey Grandmother." Mexico means Mexitli's Place; a Mexican is a person from Mexitli's Place, a person with a divine relationship to the maguey. (8) The people are of this land, and Downing suggests that only people indigenous to this land will ever be completely of it and so have complete kinship with...
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