|
Article Excerpt
On the licence plates in New Mexico it reads: 'The Land of Enchantment.' And that is it, by God! There's a huge rectangle which embraces parts of four states--Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona--and which is nothing but enchantment, sorcery, illusionismus, phantasmagoria. Perhaps the secret of the American continent is contained in this wild, forbidding and partially unexplored territory. It is the land of the Indian par excellence. Everything is hypnagogic, chthonian and super-celestial. Here Nature has gone gaga and dada. Man is just an irruption, like a wart or a pimple. Man is not wanted here. Red men, yes, but then they are so far removed from what we think of as man that they seem like another species.
--Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
It is to see our past that thousands of tourists come to New Mexico: archaeologists, geologists, antiquarians, lovers of whatever is old or out-of-date or mysterious because of old age. Our history invites the photographer.
--J. B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time
At the age of sixteen or so years, I bought a richly illustrated book for my father's birthday that celebrated wonders of nature throughout the world. I consumed the book, ostensibly a gift for my father' birthday, with eagerness, particularly the chapter on the Grand Canyon. For the most part I skipped over the text and looked at the vibrantly picturesque photographs that filled the book. The images seemed to offer the promise of adventurous experience beyond my home in suburban Hertfordshire, twenty miles north of London in England. At that point my travels abroad had been limited to family camping holidays in France, so when I came across a cache of discarded National Geographic magazines in the art classroom at my school, I was filled with a romantic longing to travel to places and experience cultures that were further removed from home. I cut out images from the magazines and juxtaposed them with my own poetry in what I wish I could report was a thrilling experiment with ekphrasis in the early Padget canon. Alas the poor meter, strained rhymes, and self-absorption of my writing were only too familiar to the legionary teachers of literature who have struggled to say complimentary words when pressed to read their adolescent pupils' heartfelt attempts at poetry. Later I would look back with discomfort at the hours I had spent attempting to refine those often crudely written stanzas. So too, after reading photographic criticism, would I learn to call into question the appeal of the imagery that I had come to prize in magazines, books, and other sources, such as the Sierra Club calendar and a pack of greeting cards illustrated with Ansel Adams's photographs. Nevertheless, such images did act as a powerful lure to hike through the Grand Canyon a few years after I purchased my father's book. And, I confess, the picturesque photography that continues to fill the pages of new coffee-table books on the Southwest and the pages of publications such as Arizona Highways and National Geographic still have a powerful sway over my imagination.
In this essay I delve into the appeal of contemporary travel and tourism in the Southwest. The subject matter complements my book Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935. (1) But whereas in that book I build authorial authority through reference to prior scholarship and extensive research in established archives, in this essay I take a rather different tack. Since first traveling to Taos and Santa Fe some fifteen years ago, I have often wondered what is the status of the experiences of place, community, and landscape that I have had as both tourist and scholarly critic. The words and images in this essay spring from an ambiguous space in which aspects of private and professional experience, personal and publicly accredited travel comingle. As I reflect on various journeys through the Southwest, a series of visual images emerges in my mind's eye. What, after all, does it mean to view a place fleetingly, at the periphery of vision, while traveling at seventy miles per hour in a car? How out of myriad impressionistic views does a certain sense of place emerge? Why is it that certain views, such as the view of the Rio Grande gorge, Taos Valley, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains from the south, can create a powerful sense of epiphany?
By paying both written and photographic attention to locations that have become invested with meaning by generations of Anglo travelers and tourists who have journeyed through the Southwest, I wish to raise several interrelated questions. What experiences have visitors sought in their travels to the region? How have visitors' interactions with certain landscapes and native populations of the region changed over the past 130 years? As the Southwest as a whole has become more developed and urbanized, particularly in the post-World War II period, how has the popular iconography of the region changed? In particular, I am fascinated by the spectacle of tourism in the region and the ways in which today's visitors respond to and consume its different landscapes--the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, the Red Rock country of Arizona, and so on. At the same time, I do not wish to comment only on the theme of travel to monumental landscapes where visitors enact their rituals of secular pilgrimage. Many of today's visitors have come to value--through the familiarity of film and television images--the experience not only of driving along interstate freeways and the region's blue highways but also of viewing the roadside architecture of the region, be it a mammoth-sized truck stop or an eye-catching design on a restaurant or shop.
THE GRAND CANYON
Before referring to the present day, it is necessary to backtrack to the period when the Southwest was "discovered" and "created" by the Anglo cultural imagination. Geographically speaking, northern Arizona, northern New Mexico, southern Colorado, and southern Utah comprise the subregion of the Southwest that I have in mind. A large portion of this area is covered by the Indian Country map produced by the Automobile Club of Southern California, which highlights places of special interest, such as historical and cultural attractions, and opportunities for hiking, mountain biking, river rafting, and other forms of recreational tourism. The map covers an area of land that, starting in the mid- to late nineteenth century was celebrated for its "wonders" of nature and became associated with a powerful indigenous presence, be it the Rio Grande pueblos of New Mexico, the Hopi Indians of northern Arizona, or the Navajo Indians, whose huge reservation takes in extensive territory in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. In recent decades, scholars in a number of disciplines--history, geography, literature, anthropology, and art history--have striven to explain how and why the Southwest became associated with powerful myths of authenticity, tricultural heritage (the myth of...
|
