RESOLUCIÓN N° 2.254-DGR/

Many factors contributed to the Southwest’s popularity in the late nineteenth century, but the career of writer Charles Lummis was important to launching the region into a national spotlight in the 1890s, and Lummis continued to play a key role in how the literary Southwest evolved and circulated in the early twentieth century. Lummis’s writing and projects helped shape both the design of Southwestern tourism and literary representations of the Southwest. In this way, Lummis significantly influenced how tourists and readers experienced the region. As I’ll demonstrate, Lummis created and popularized a version of the Southwest centered on the region’s Spanish colonial legacy. In the process, he established some hallmarks of regional tourism that remain influential today.

Lummis’s lasting contribution to the American imaginary was popularizing the Southwest as a distinct region with historical and cultural traits that set it apart from the rest of the U.S. West. He argued for the Southwest’s importance to American culture at large, publicizing Southwestern history’s important contribution to American culture. In the process, Lummis worked to popularize experiential cultural tourism in southern California and the greater Southwest, with a particular emphasis on Spanish colonial and Latinx traditions and folkways. Recognizing that there was much for American tourists to enjoy about the Southwest, he promoted regionally-specific food, music, and architecture in his travel writing and tourism

projects. A savvy marketer, Lummis saw that these forms of tourism would help him realize his goal of making the Southwest a national travel destination. He also anticipated the popularity of folk and regional cultures in the early twentieth century, laid the groundwork for the Southwest’s popular tourism, and directed the ways that modernists interacted with and represented the region. Lummis even took credit for coining the phrase “See America First,” a slogan adopted in advertisements for the Great Northern Railway in the early twentieth century urging Americans to choose domestic tourism over vacations abroad.

As Dydia DeLyser notes, tourism in the U.S. West was treated as something of a patriotic obligation (DeLyser 48). The sentiment framed tourism as a celebration of nationhood, in which intrepid pioneering is translated into a leisure activity. It’s unclear whether the slogan really did originate with Lummis—he was prone to exaggerating his accomplishments—but he spent much of his career declaring that travelling in the Southwest and studying it were acts of patriotism.

Lummis was drawn to the Southwest in 1885 by an intense interest in the histories of New Spain and the region’s Indigenous communities. Once in California, he began a series of cultural preservation efforts and writing projects devoted to popularizing the Southwest. He was attracted to the Southwest for its multicultural history, especially the vestiges of the Spanish conquest in the region. As a Spanish territory in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the region functioned mainly as a territorial outpost. Its distance and isolation from the colonial capital of Mexico City resulted in less adherence to colonial culture—instead, the colonizers of the northern frontier blended Indigenous and European practices in a manner that “transformed Spanish culture through adjustments in […] dress, diet, medicine, homes, and communities” (Vargas 7). These multicultural “adjustments”—affecting Southwestern clothing, food, architecture, and cultural practices—provided the foundation of Lummis’s Southwestern

marketing campaign and formed the basis of a lifestyle he embraced and promoted. As I’ll explore in this chapter, Lummis encouraged regional tourism through ethnic masquerade, and helped popularize Spanish Colonial-era dress, Native and Spanish jewelry, song, and food as part of Southwestern tourism experiences. Drawing on Philip Deloria’s conception of “playing Indian,” I’ll also explore the impact of Lummis’s cultural appropriation.

Lummis’s move to the Southwest was well timed. He set out on a campaign to promote the region during an era when the future of the greater U.S. West appeared to be increasingly in flux. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner introduced his frontier thesis to a meeting of American historians in Chicago at the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition. Turner suggested that the event that had defined the American experience for the last century—westward expansion, and the perception of nearly-endless available land—had just concluded. In contrast, Lummis argued for a west-to-east narrative of American history, and in doing so he offered a way to divert nostalgia for westward expansion into leisure travel. Like Turner, Lummis sought to answer the question of how American identity, which had in the nineteenth century heavily depended on narratives of pioneering and conquest, would evolve after the country’s westward expansion was more or less complete. According to Turner, the frontier had just closed, but Lummis’s The Spanish Pioneers, also published in 1893, maintained that the Southwest held plenty of opportunities for Americans who still aspired to pioneering.

In particular, Lummis argued that modern Americans would do well to study the lessons of the Spanish colonials. He identified in Spain’s conquest of the Americas an imperial model of aggressive nationalism and masculinity that he believed had declined in U.S. culture since the end of westward expansion. Americans should look to the Spanish conquistadors to revive the nation’s pioneering spirit, which was implicitly masculine.

Lummis promoted a version of American exceptionalism so powerful that it appropriated other nations’ empires to enhance a narrative of U.S. geopolitical power. By Lummis’s logic, the legacy of New Spain had paved the way for the U.S. project of Anglo-led westward expansion, and so he placed value on the history of New Spain because it was important to Anglo America. In doing so, Lummis’s version of Southwestern history erased the experiences of Native and Spanish-heritage/Latinx people in the Southwest. As I’ll demonstrate in this chapter, the “revival” of the Spanish-language Southwest, which Lummis helped to institute, failed to acknowledge any contemporary Latinx cultures in the Southwest, instead presenting the Spanish Southwest as a set of cultural ingredients for Anglo American readers to enjoy on vacation or in their homes (and, significantly, through English translation).

A recovery of Lummis’s role in shaping cultural perceptions of the Southwest provides a backstory that is essential to fully tracing the confluence of modernism, tourism, and popular culture in the twentieth-century Southwest. I argue that Lummis significantly shaped the Southwest’s position in the national imaginary in several roles—his position as a popular writer and public figure, his work with the tourism industry, and his influence on later Southwestern writers. Lummis popularized a selective, limited historical account of Spanish colonialism, and he worked to preserve elements of Southwestern culture in contexts that cloaked their political significance—through this work, he helped to turn a story of conquest into an era viewed nostalgically as one of romance and masculinity. Writing about multicultural tourism in the US, Heather Diamond notes that projects meant to popularize ethnic or folk cultures have historically been “endeavors that showcased the traditional practices of people considered cultural outsiders,” and that these projects were directed at white audiences, often resulting in misrepresentation and appropriation (Diamond 6). Similarly, Lummis’s projects often

misrepresented or flattened the complexity of the cultures that he intended to celebrate. As Diamond, Thomas Guthrie, and others have observed, and as I’ll address at greater length at the end of this chapter, these sorts of tensions continue to plague endeavors to promote multiculturalism, especially as a commercial enterprise.

This chapter chronicles Lummis’s creation of a distinct Southwest by exploring several of his multimedia projects—from popular history to cookbooks to folk music—which established a lasting set of narratives about the region. I look first at Lummis’s history book The Spanish Pioneers (1893), in which he argued for the relevance of Spanish colonialism in understanding American history, particularly westward expansion. I turn next to Lummis’s efforts to recover aspects of Spanish colonial culture by exploring his restorations of Spanish Missions in southern California, his compilations of Spanish folk recipes, and his translations of Spanish language folk songs. Through these projects, Lummis shaped the Southwest as we know it.