Abstract
A highly visible and visual apprehension of the cultural heritage of the Southwest, viewed through the distorting and dislocating lenses of multiple popular visual narratives, established a largely feminized visual imaginary of Southwestern cultural heritage that has functioned largely intact and relatively unquestioned, even by the region’s tri-cultural residents for almost a century. Visual imaginaries carry a profound visual capital and can frame desire, expectation, and value. Images have the power to construct and sustain visual discourses, regimes, and culturally constructed visualities, two of which competed to describe the cultural heritage of the Southwest between World War I and World War II: that of the masculinized traveler and that of the feminized tourist. The feminized visuality of the tourist not only emerged as dominant but as the popularly constructed visual narrative of the “enchanted Southwest’. The monocular direct gaze of the largely male Anglo newcomers was, however, refracted in a multi-ocular, multi-perspectival sideways glance by Anglo women active in popular visual spaces, who collectively and cumulatively posited a complex, imbricated, and tri-culturally interlaced visual narrative. Their domesticated and feminized touristic visual imaginary shaped an understanding and perception of the Southwest as “enchanted,” a construct that not only remains relatively unchallenged today, but still functions as the region’s prevalent popular narrative of cultural heritage.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “Indian” is used throughout as the preferred term used by the Native Peoples of the Southwest.
- 2.
Fergusson also provided commentary on several Anglo residents: “Witter Bynner bought and wore and hung on his friends a famous collection of Indian jewelry. Alice Corbin introduced the velvet Navajo blouse. Stetson hats, cowboy boots, flannel shirts, and even blankets were the approved costume….Jane Henderson [Baumann] made a record by living in Santa Clara all winter and learning a whole repertoire of Indian songs. Mary Austen [sic] discovered and ordered her life to the beat of the Amerindian rhythm…[and]…, Carlos Vierra and Jesse Nussbaum designed the state museum along lines of the pueblo missions: poems and pictures were Indian strained through such diverse personalities as Parsons, Cassidy, Baumann, and Nordfeldt” (Fergusson 1937, p. 377).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the many archivists and curators who have assisted me in this research. Thanks are also owed to Helaine Silverman and Mike Robinson, Joanna Grabski, Jacque Pelasky, and Keery Walker.
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Sperling, J. (2015). Women, Tourism, and the Visual Narrative of Interwar Tourism in the American Southwest. In: Robinson, M., Silverman, H. (eds) Encounters with Popular Pasts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13183-2_5
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