Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Some might consider “Mexican American environmental writing” an oxymoron, yet Mexican American writing is a very valuable resource for environmental thought. Mexican Americans’ deep historical ties to the land—working the land in sustainable ways—and the narration of these ties in memoirs and novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century prove invaluable resources for traditional environmental knowledge. Up to now, no one has taken the time to establish a methodical mapping of Mexican American environmental writing. Writing a Mexican American environmental literary history involves two challenges: to establish as deep a historical context as possible, and to offer a comprehensive geographic representation. This paper is part of this larger project and concerns the environmental writer Adelina Otero Warren from New Mexico, a region that contains a rich history of writing about the natural environment, and delves into the early twentieth century, a period of dynamic development in the Mexican American identity.

This paper will discuss Otero Warren’s Old Spain in Our Southwest and an article about New Mexico schools that she published in a May 1931 issue of Survey Graphic, a magazine published by progressives in New York City. Few scholars have considered Otero Warren’s work, and when they have, they consider her more as a “social broker” than as a writer. To be sure, Otero Warren was a suffragette who helped bring women the vote in New Mexico and she was a distinguished Superintendent of the Santa Fe School District for several years. Yet her writings remain neglected. She wrote Old Spain in Our Southwest to offer advanced schoolchildren a way to access their “Spanish” culture in New Mexico. As a result, this book offers specific details about life on ranches in the Southwest and about cultural practices that mediated the relationship between humans and nature. Her article in Survey Graphic argued for a richer cultural component to education in New Mexico schools and appeared alongside works by leading intellectual, cultural and artistic figures of her day including Diego Rivera, Ansel Adams, Mary Austin, Georgia O’Keefe, Frank Applegate, D.H. Lawrence, and Manuel Gamio. This May 1931 issue of Survey Graphic proclaimed as its theme “Mexicans in Our Midst” and it asked each of these writers and artists to contribute their views on the presence and contributions of Mexicans in and to the United States. Not coincidentally, many of these artists and writers lived in New Mexico at the time they contributed to this magazine. This paper will explore Otero Warren’s contribution to the magazine as well as her relationship to one of the other contributors to the magazine, Mary Austin, who has been considered an environmental writer for years now. Overall, this paper will offer a reading of early twentieth century writings by New Mexican author Adelina Otero Warren to show how Mexican American environmental writers are concerned with an everyday relationship between humans and nature that extends beyond the boundaries of nature writing and offers an overlooked wealth of traditional environmental knowledge.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: The Santa Fe Trail offers one of the most romantic combinations of geography, history, literature and energy in American history. The eight-hundred-mile journey’s fame invited people to experience the scene for themselves and to write about that experience in terms of health, peace, adventure and survival. English poets like Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley (“Away, away from men and towns to the silent wilderness.”) were oft-quoted to justify travelers “jumping off” to the unroofed world of the West beyond the bend of the Missouri River. Travelers marveled at the lack of development, while those who made the trip for a living recorded the danger, sweat, hardships, and rewards of walking eight-hundred miles across the Southwest while simultaneously organizing and feeding as many as three thousand head of cattle and protecting their profits from weather and marauding Indians. The Trail itself is an important subject of study as it became by the 1840s and 1850s a major artery in the development of the Southwest, the path through which a lucrative trade between the nascent Kansas City and the fledgling towns of New Mexico flourished.

One of the most unappreciated aspects of the trail experience is the amount of animal and human energy it took to make the trip. Energy is usually a silent partner in American historical narrative, but in the study of the Santa Fe Trail the record shows that a Herculean expenditure of human and animal energy was so commonplace that it was sometimes best observed by the uninitiated eye of the stranger. In keeping with the topic of this panel, this paper marries the practical commentary on the energy requirements for the trip by such wagon masters as Alexander Majors to the warblings of such poetic visitors to the Trail as Francis Parkman (the famed Western historian), Susan Magoffan (the first white woman to make the trip), and Horace Greeley (one of then nineteenth century’s most formidable newspaper editors). In so doing, it offers a cultural reflection on this thin line of commerce (in people, in beasts, and in goods) that spanned a good swath of Southwestern geography.