OLD SOUTHWEST, NEW SOUTHWEST: ESSAYS ON...

In November of 1985, Western scholars and writers met in Tucson, Ariz., to celebrate the past, consider the present and bemoan the future of the Southwestern land while expressing high hopes for its literature. The papers presented at that conference have been collected in this volume that is sure to attract lovers of Mary Austin’s “land of little rain.”

More questions are raised than answered, but the questions themselves are provocative indeed. Who speaks for the Southwest--the Indians, Hispanics or Anglos? How can one region contain both remote Indian pueblos and cities with high-rise skylines? Where is the Southwest? Is it an actual territory or a state of mind? Why has the area caught the national imagination today when for decades it was so remote and ignored that many people didn’t even know that New Mexico was a state and that you didn’t need a passport to go there? Finally, what do Southwestern writers have to say to readers and writers in the rest of the country?

Native American artist/author N. Scott Momaday discusses how both painting and writing about the region are not two distinct art forms but “so closely related as to be indivisible.” Veteran Western writer Frank Waters makes a memorable reference in his essay to how the lasting Native American presence and Spanish stamp on the Southwestern land and literature differentiate it from the rest of “Anglo” America. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith talks about the inevitability of the continuing Spanish or bilingual tradition in the writing by Texans of Mexican descent. John Nichols quotes Bertolt Brecht: “Young man, reach for a book; it is a weapon.” Nichols discourses on the myth of Taos as a spiritually powerful place, a beautiful haven for artists and writers. It is also one of the poorest counties in the nation and one of the most polluted areas of the Southwest. “ . . . One of the things I tried to do in . . . ‘The Milagro Beanfield War’ was to write about social problems. . . . I don’t know how many people who read it are aware that ‘Milagro’ is a book about class struggle, or that it’s written by a person with a Marxist’s world view, whose aim is to teach, propagandize, and, ultimately, change the reader’s social, economic and political perceptions of the universe.”

Not everyone in this probing collection of essays makes statements as challenging or as radical as Nichols, but all ask the right questions about this most mysterious and fragile area of the country where Anglo, Native American and Hispanic cultures join together in a uniquely American place.