Arid region with Arizona and New Mexico at its core, featuring native cultures, a strong
Hispanic and Mexican presence, and an Anglo presence since the 1840s. The American
Southwest is not an easy area to define. Most scholars will agree on the states of Arizona
and New Mexico, the southern parts of Colorado and Utah, and west Texas around El
Paso. However, the differences start there. Does one include the Mojave Desert of
California? How far into Texas does one go? How far into Utah and Colorado? Does one
define the area on the basis of physical characteristics, shared life forms, cultural
characteristics, or a combination of all three? This vagueness of boundaries appears to be
one of the characteristics of the region.
However one sets its boundaries, the Southwest is a dry land in comparison with the
rest of the United States. This dryness, while very real, did not prevent indigenous
cultures from developing there, more or less influenced by developments in
Mesoamerica. The native cultures vary widely, from the village-building pueblo peoples
of the north to the desertdwelling O’odham of southern Arizona, to the Navajo and
Apache peoples, probably relatively recent arrivals in the region.
The first Europeans in the American Southwest were Spaniards, with a history of
exploration dating from Cabeza de Vaca’s journey through the region in 1535–1536, and
a history of settlement dating from the arrival in northern New Mexico of Oñate’s
colonists in 1598. By the 1840s, there were Mexican (previously Spanish) settlements in
northern and southern New Mexico, El Paso, and southern Arizona. In 1848 much of the
region became part of the United States through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending
the war with Mexico; southern Arizona was added in 1853 through the Gadsden
Purchase. Since that time, the region has been subject to increasingly intense
immigration, both from the rest of the United States and from Mexico.
Culturally speaking, the Southwest has been defined mostly from the outside. Santa
Fe, Tucson, and El Paso may resemble one another when seen from New York or New
England, but from within the region one sees the differences as much as the similarities.
Most of the writers who have fixed the images of the region in literature have come from
elsewhere.
From the beginning, with Coronado’s quest for a rich native civilization, Europeans
have come to this region in search of something. Minerals, land for cattle raising, and
native souls to bring into the fold of the Catholic Church were important objectives
during Spanish times. Those three goals remained important through much of the 19th
and 20th centuries as well, with business opportunities and, increasingly, a place to lead the good life eventually supplanting them. The lure of the Other seems to remain as
strong as it was in Coronado’s time.
In order to understand the region fully, one must remember that it has been “the
Southwest” only since the 1840s and 1850s. Before that it was northwestern Mexico;
before that, stretching back in time to the early 16th century, it was northwestern New
Spain. Before that, if some archaeologists are to be believed, the region was the
northernmost extension of the high cultures of the Valley of Mexico. Paradoxically, the
cultural features that most distinguish the 1990s Southwest as a tourist destination—the
features that comprise its identification with the Other—result from its historic character
as a northern or northwestern frontier.
It is a cliché that there are three cultures in the Southwest: Native American, Hispanic,
and Anglo. This is, of course, an oversimplification. Native American cultures in the
region differ from one another in every way imaginable. Hispanics vary from the
descendants of 18th-century settlers in northern New Mexico to late-20th-century from
Mexico, Central and South America, and even Spain itself. Anglos include Anglo
Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans—everyone, in fact, who is neither
Hispanic nor Native American.
Hispanic cultures may be best discussed under two headings: the Hispanos of northern
New Mexico and southern Colorado, and Mexican Americans everywhere else. Younger,
more politically active members of both groups often prefer the term “chicanos.” New
Mexican Hispano culture has its roots in the 17th- and 18th-century colonial settlements
in the region. It is traditionally pastoral, agricultural, and Catholic in nature. Religious
arts include alabados (hymns), carved and painted santos (sacred Catholic images), and
such ritual music and dance clusters as los Matachines (a ritual contra dance spread
throughout much of former New Spain). The Penitente Brotherhood, a religious
organization devoted to emulating some of the sufferings of Jesus Christ and providing
community social welfare, permeated many of the villages, intensifying the ritual life.
Secular forms include romances and their descendants, corridos (ballads), traditional
tales in a wide variety, and a rich store of proverbs, riddles, and other forms. Secular
folklife includes a repertoire of instrumental dance music (fiddle and guitar), a distinctive
regional architecture based on adobe construction, and agricultural techniques including
the organization of irrigation water.
Mexican American culture is much more widely distributed in the Southwest than is
the northern village culture. There has always been passage to and fro across the border; a
major wave of immigration accompanied the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1928. Other
waves have succeeded this first one, and the Mexican Americans of the late-20th-century
Southwest come from all parts of Mexico, bringing with them a variety of regional
traditions.
Religious traditions include some that are similar to those of the New Mexico
Hispanos. Los Matachines, for instance, is danced all over the region. Belief clusters
involving the saints, death, and ghosts also have a wide distribution throughout the area.
Tales of the devil appearing at a social dance have been collected in southern Colorado,
northern New Mexico, and southern Arizona. La Llorona, the wailing woman who haunts
watercourses and threatens to carry off children, is present in the Southwest as she is all
over the Mexican American world. Tales of buried treasure are told and believed all
through the Southwest as they are in much of rural Mexico.
Traditional music of the region ranges from unaccompanied alabado and corrido
singing, to guitar-accompanied singing, to full orchestral styles. The latter include the
norteño style with accordion lead, developed along the Texas-Mexican border, and the
relatively recent import of mariachi music, once the regional folk music of the Mexican
state of Jalisco and now the national musical symbol of Mexico.
Traditional foods vary within the region, but all are based on corn, beans, and chile
peppers. In southern Arizona, wheat and beef gain importance; in northern New Mexico,
pork is more common. Common all over are the tortilla and its derivatives, the enchilada
and the taco; the tamale, a native Mexican dish often served on holiday occasions; and
soups and stews using meats, beans, hominy, and other vegetables.
Traditional material culture includes the creation of several classes of ephemeral folk
art. Piñatas are containers made of clay, or molded out of papier mache, and covered
with cut and fringed colored tissue paper. They may take many different shapes: animals,
clowns, and such popular culture figures as Superman and theTeenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles. They are filled with candies and broken by children at birthday parties and other
festive occasions.
Cascarones are eggshells that have been filled with confetti and decorated and that are
broken over partygoers’ heads. Paper flowers are traditionally made for weddings, to
decorate home altars, and for floral offerings on the family graves at All Souls’ Day.
All of these art forms have been taken over by Anglo Americans and used, not for
their original purposes, but as interior decorations. The dominant society of the
Southwest has a long history of co-opting elements of culture from both Hispanics and
Native Americans and using them to give a regional flavor to their lives. This has
happened with architectural forms, with foods (especially corn chips and salsa), and with
such selected items of dress as the guayavera shirt of tropical Mexico.
This is not to say that Anglo American culture in the Southwest is simply derivative of
Mexican and Native American cultures. Many traditions found elsewhere in the
country—Mormonism and cowboy culture among others—flourish in the Southwest in
their own regional variants, but much of Anglo folklore that is distinctive to the region
reflects in one way or another the presence of Native American and Hispanic traditions.
Some of this lore is prejudicial and stereotypic in nature. Beliefs, stories, and jokes
hinging on negative stereo types of Mexicans and Indians abound.
Paradoxically enough, the same Anglo society that produces this negative lore uses
Hispanic and Native American images in its construction and marketing of the Southwest
as a tourist and retirement region, which is the way the Southwest has been marketed
since the turn of the 20th century, when the Fred Harvey Company sought to lure tourists
to stop at its hotels while traveling by train across the continent. The marketing of the
region by Anglos to other Anglos continues with such 1980s concepts as the “Santa Fe
Style.”
James S.Griffith
References
Byrkit, James W., ed. 1992. Land, Sky, and People: The Southwest Defined. Journal of the
Southwest (Special Issue) 34:(3).
Griffith, James S. 1992. Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimeria Alta.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Weigle, Marta, and Peter White. 1988. The Lore of New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press.
Wilder, Joseph C., ed. 1990. Inventing the Southwest. Journal of the Southwest. (Special Issue.)
32:(4).