Theorising a Shape for the ‘American West’
The West, the American West, the Frontier, the Borderlands, and the Homelands: each a term to describe a complex physical place, where writers and historians have tried to make sense out of by theorising different historical narratives. What the actual properties are of this ‘place’ are incredibly more nuanced than one word could ever capture. In chronicling the history of such a place, the word ‘history’, and its derivative ‘story’, imply a narrative told from one perspective. Yet we know there are many different factors and dynamics that contribute to the differences in framing that different perspectives might tell. To articulate this, I will consider professor Frederick J. Turner of the University of Wisconsin in his 1925 address to the American Historical Association, in association with two novels: Borderlands/La Frontera: A New Mestiza, first published in 1987 by Gloria Anzuldúa, and Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, published in 2013 by Deborah Miranda. There is a peculiar tension that emerges when comparing such texts on this subject. Such tension is a direct result of the phenomena of the West itself, both a myth and a legend, a story that has been told historically from one perspective, but that takes a completely new shape when told from another. To understand this, it must first be outlined exactly what this myth is, and how it was established, as Turner describes in his paper. With this backdrop, Miranda’s telling of her own Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family heritage as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole, demystifies the American West. Then, in conversation with Anzaldúa’s work, a vision for the future is shaped by the past, by looking at Anzaldúa’s Chicana ancestry and the Border lands and cultures that she is familiar with. By the end of this paper, I will provide evidence of an altogether new shape that American Western history could take that diverts from Turner’s vision completely.
If you watched a Hollywood movie in the Western genre, you’d get the gist of how Frederick J. Turner saw the Frontier. He expressed a strong pride in his writing, praising Americans for adapting to ‘primitive economic and political conditions’ in the Frontier, suggesting the metaphor of a ‘perennial rebirth’ of opportunity to further expansion. In his 1925 paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, Turner wrote matter-of-factly, about the stages of Frontier advancement, including mention of the only places where their progress is obstructed. At ‘natural boundaries’ or places where the only prevention to advancement was the landscape of the area being too harsh;
“The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarters of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.”
Despite being labelled as obstructions to advancement, it is clear Turner included these places as indications of the success of ‘civilization’, going as far to state that “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.”. But why omit California from this narrative/ The answer lies in a closer look at how this ‘advancement’ played out in subsequent generations.
Returning to the subject of stories, Deborah Miranda appropriately begins her 2013 memoir with an introduction titled “California is A Story”. In this Chapter, Miranda’s account briefly chronicles her own family history, grappling with the California story that has shaped her reality in the 20th and 21st century; “having spent a lifetime being told I’m not a “real Indian”.” By this she means the erasure of California Indians by the Spanish missionization of the 18th century, including the attempted erasure of her own Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen heritage. Turner’s version of the story begins with the “Indian and the hunter”, not as a developed society but as the arrival of the European trader as the start of “disintegration of savagery”, and uses the metaphor of a palimpsest to compare the ‘social evolution’ of the lands mentioned above. This metaphor provides the imagery to explain the layering erasure of culture that Miranda experienced in her own lifetime. Miranda mentions that prior to Kiowa N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer prize in 1969, the ones telling California’s story were not its Indigenous people, which was enough to establish a legacy of stereotypes and prejudice towards them. By the time her child was in school, the Carmel mission was the biggest tourist destination in Monterrey Country, and students were expected to do a fourth grade project on ‘Mission Mythology’. Miranda makes a stark comparison of this to atrocities committed in Missions to those on Mississippi Plantations or German Concentration Camps. This is echoed further by events in her own father’s life, which was “ not just about being Californian, but being California Indian after a great holocaust: out of an estimated one million Indigenous inhabitants, only twenty thousand survived the misssionization era.” Grappling with this means understanding that much of your identity as a Native person is tied to the trauma of the loss of land, and of culture. Her book, half poetry, half essay, reads in some parts like a deep inward breath of her truth, and in some parts like a breath out of the intergenerational suffering that California Indians have been subjected to for generations. Miranda provides a perspective that is well-rooted, and tied in many ways to the past and the present. It is a sobering response to Turner and the colonial ideology of Western expansion by providing a powerful and subjective picture of what the real cost of this so-called ‘progress’ and ‘development’ is.
Bad Indians in conversation with Borderlands, mirrors Miranda’s experiences with Anzaldúa’s. Like a kaleidoscope, depending on which angle you look, the story of the West takes a new shape as new perspectives are introduced. This is what Anzaldua draws upon when referecing her Chicana and Lesbian identity to constructing both a memoir and a manifesto, as her work in Borderlands is considered foundational to contemporary feminist and intersectional studies. She tells cultural stories as metaphors for what the Chicana have been through, such as the potent Chicano/Mexicano symbol of la Virgen de Guadalupe, whose origin she theorises as being warped by Spanish Catholics, and the ‘Cervicide-the killing of a deer.’ and its archetypal symbology to killing of the female Self. These stories are more than simply anecdotes: they are the roots of a story that is personal, subjective, and unique to Anzaldúa's truth, and that she is aware cannot be denied. On the subject of this, she writes that:
“In trying to become “objective”, Western culture made “objects” of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing “touch” with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence.”
She provides a stark contrast to Turner’s idea of the American Frontier as a land with no history, consistently providing examples of the Mexican and Indian knowledge of the land that persisted despite violent attempts to eradicate it. In introducing the lands to be instead a ‘Borderlands’, she writes of the inner struggle, across any race, that has been “played out in the outer terrains”. For people living in Borderlands, existing in an in-between place becomes a site of empowerment for those who live in those places are in constant flux with identity and thus, are able to live in ambiguity. If not convincing enough, there are many who have expressed how her work has resonated with them, and put into words their own experiences: Julia Alvarez writes in the preface to the third edition how a mobility that exists as Mexican-Americans allows for a maintained connection to homelands whilst undergoing a change within, one that caught them between worlds.
Call it a Borderland, a no man’s land, a “new [Latina] consciousness based on the tolerance for the contradictions we have inherited.” Still, language is limited. And by the very nature of this subject, this research is limited as well. Writers Deborah Miranda and Gloria Anzaldúa are just two of the alternative perspectives, but their perspectives encompass the richness of a deeper history that must be considered in reckoning the American West. One thing, however, is certain. In comparison to the perspective of a History professor from the University of Wisconsin in 1925, the alternate history of the ‘Frontier’ is one of violence, theft and dispossession, genocide of entire lineages, and ongoing settler colonial harm caused by the perpetuation of this narrative over a century from when it began. It is only through the tedious untanglings of such narratives through analysis of alternative perspectives that we can understand the gravity and immensity of the parts missing from the story. Anzaldúa knows that an awareness of their situation “must come before inner changes, which in turn comes before changes in society.” A new shape, one neither masculine nor feminine, not White, Indian, Mexican, or other, but an ambiguous one.
February 24th 2022
