Globalization and the American Southwest

By Charles Ynfante

The influence of globalization in the American Southwest is not a new or recent trend of the twentieth or twenty-first century. The phenomenon of globalization goes back centuries to the arrival of the first Spanish and the French, among others. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are only the most pronounced aspects of globilization but there are earlier influences as well. My study is a general overview.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Ynfante
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215444979

Charles Ynfante

Charles Ynfante acquired a Ph.D. in history from Northern University Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona.  He was a Fellow at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. He has authored numerous books of fiction. He was a participant in Hollywood motion pictures, television, and theater.

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INTRODUCTION

The impact of globalization on the American Southwest is the subject of this book. By globalization I mean more than manufactured goods or services moving from one point of the world to another. Globalization here encompasses theology; social constructions or prejudices; migrations of people and animals; technology, science, language, and disease; wars and revolutions; capitalism and imperialism; and global warming. These are multiple causes—-interactive behavior—-for how globalization has influenced and continues to influence the American Southwest.

Historians concern themselves with the interactive behavior of masses, institutions, and individuals.  For historians, multiple causation is a fundamental explanation.  However, historians do not know when they have established the ultimate causes of the past. Richard Hofstadter cautioned scholars about mixing their `nows’ with their `thens,’ about stirring too much present into too little past. The resulting blend would be short on `respect for the integrity, the independence, the pastness, of the past. ¹

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These aspects of globalization I present in a topical format. I have chosen this approach because the themes can be better understood and seen more clearly rather than through a traditional chronological point-of-view. A chronological approach would have required splitting up each theme to accommodate that view. The types of themes I address are not exhaustive. This is a survey of the most salient ones.

This thesis, which is a proposition to be maintained and proved, contends that given all of the influence and impact globalization has had on the American Southwest much of life and culture has remained the same until only recently. By recently, I mean the period from the late 1930s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. But this must be qualified. Relative to the rest of the country, the American Southwest is still a wide-open landscape, and relatively still unchanged.

To the casual observer, the region appears quiet, serene, and relatively empty. The area is rural with characteristics unlike the rest of the country. Globalization is a dynamic process and its effects have crossed over this region many times. How can global trends have entered the American Southwest and not have left more salient footprints? My purpose is to attempt to find an answer.

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One aspect of globalization is spirituality and religion. How did Christianity, originating in one part of the world, impact the American Southwest? Long before Christopher Columbus, many individuals in Europe believed that the Garden of Eden existed in actuality. They believed it was located in the region near India and later in the mountains of South America. Whatever characteristics of primitive Christianity Columbus had attributed to the Natives he encountered in the Caribbean, which was the culmination of over two thousand years of a preconceived belief, these notions were reversed when Renaissance Europeans entered the Southwest. The conquistadors considered the Native Americans to be heathens and less than human.

Another aspect of globalization is the European attitude that placed European people as more superior and advanced than the Natives of the Southwest. In other words, social constructions of race and ethnicity relegated people in the Southwest to second and third class minority status. These mental constructs were imported. Their influence is still felt today.

Also fundamentally important is the migration of people to the New World. These migrations began out of Africa with the first humans, continued with the peopling of the Americas, and culminated with the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century and beyond. The actual presence of people in the Southwest impacted the physical environment and its resources.

The globalization of technology, science, and disease also play a part. These influences impacted the population of the Southwest, which, by their power, should have homogenized the local cultures into what was becoming the dominant Anglo-European society. Instead, after five centuries of these influences, the Southwest Natives have rebounded with their culture and identity.

The Second World War influenced the social life of the Southwest. Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and others had to adjust and to deal with the dominant white society. German and Italian prisoners-of-war were relocated to the region where they aided in agriculture and other work vital to the war effort. Military installations and federal money came to dominate the local economies and helped to prepare for what came to be the Cold War.

Capitalism, a European invention, became a worldwide phenomenon. This impacted the relationships of various groups of indigenous people in the Southwest. Political organizations and trading patterns of the Natives either changed or became strengthened as a result of this intrusion by capitalism.

Imperialism, a policy of acquiring dependent territories, a corollary of internationalism, reduced the Southwest to a pawn. The Southwest, as a focus of geography rather than of people, became a potential battleground among competing nations. The region became a buffer against the threatening encroachment of foreign nations and became a possible nexus for a complete North American empire.

Finally, I discuss the impact of Global Warming: the aridity and drought-prone environment of the Southwest. These are serious matters, impacting future development and population growth in the American Southwest.

CHAPTER 1. THE WEST.

THE WEST as a PROCESS

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Globalization is a process. According to Jared Diamond, Globalization is not restricted to good things carried only from the First to the Third World.  ²

Indeed, this process is not simply things that are good but also abstract notions that can be both. For example, ideas, conceptions, and attitudes are part of this process. For the most part, these things and notions had their origin in Europe, and, like a wave, spread across the globe.

This process of globalization has impacted the American Southwest. Specifically in the Southwest, Europeans and settlers had to rely on outside help to succeed and to survive. This help, which was globalization, came as capital and through technical innovations, which was made possible by the global industrial and transportation industries, making mining, ranching, and farming possible.  ³

The American West, however, is both process and place. This double dynamic had helped to not only create this mystique of the West but also maintain it. Henry Nash Smith proposed that the West existed, not only as a cartographic region, but also as part of the American mind.  The American West plays an immense role in shaping and explaining American history. This truism has been molded into a popular understanding that the West remains heroically detached from anywhere and anytime else in the nation and the nation’s past.  ⁴

Whatever its boundaries, the American West is not only a region beyond the Mississippi but also the process of getting there. This aspect of the western frontier is a unifying American theme, for every part of the country was once a frontier, every region was once a West.  Frederick Jackson Turner focused on nature as the influence of western history. Nature, Turner said, transformed America in those many places considered the West. On Turner’s frontier, nature served as a cornucopia of potential commodities, an abundance of resources, unused and free for the taking.  ⁵  According to William Deverell,

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The West is not only a concept but also many places and many processes. Any period of western time or area of space reveals its complexity. This complexity embraces the vagaries of geopolitical history that have defined the West, the region’s permutations of social process and demography, and the clash of cultural and ethnic contests. When gathered as a collection of different Wests, the western landscape, ideas, and people become meaningful and significant.  ⁶

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THE WEST as a PLACE

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The American Southwest is classically defined as extending roughly from Durango, Colorado, to Durango, Mexico, and from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Las Vegas, New Mexico. There is the point-of-view that the West is a specific, identifiable place. Western history is the story of how the region was influenced by the interaction of diverse cultures with each other and with nature.  ⁷

The west as a distinct region is not new. Walter Prescott Webb supported a regional approach in his 1931 study The Great Plains. Webb believed that the West was different. Its customs, institutions, and habits of mind were unlike those in any other part of the nation. The West has an enduring distinctiveness. However, much of the work challenging older notions of the West challenges this supposed western distinctiveness and exceptionalism, which tends to marginalize political, cultural, and academic realities. Donald Worster said that he had never been able to conceive of the West as a process in motion. Instead, he believes of it as a distinct place with distinct people. Worster’s essay, New West, True West, urges historians to view the West as a fixed geographic location.  ⁸

What has changed has been the image of the American West as a rural region with a sparse population depended heavily on mining, ranching, and agriculture. The new image is one of a heavily industrialized urban west where cities play important roles. Yet, aircraft has added to the perception of the West. The airplane provides an accurate view. When you fly over the western landscape, you can see how little of the land is settled. Lights are few and far between. Green circles or squares of farmland appear tiny.  As complement to the built and natural environments, the West reveals a history that appears bigger than life. The western embrace—however geologically or geographically defined—collects the histories of people, living and dead, which is the basis of social and political history.  ⁹

Associated with this regionalism, fixed geographic location, and process is the idea of the West as a battleground among people and social constructs.

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The West witnessed all those legal, militaristic, and ideological constructs and institutions that made possible and glorified the continental stretch to full length. It is an often dark and bloody ground, this West, stained by the shame of genocidal combat, greed, and environmental destruction.  ¹⁰

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Patricia Nelson Limerick believes that the relationships among people that have characterized the West are based on conquest of one group over another or what she has described as a legacy of conquest. Specifically, communal land became private property. Likewise, Richard White contends that the West is a product of conquest, based on the acquisition of land and resources. Historian Bernard de Voto says that the West was a plundered province.  ¹¹

There is a larger-than-life narrative, or story, of the American West supported by the perceptions of journalists, politicians and corporations. Their views are protected by nostalgia and sentiment. In short, although There are different significances about different Wests, there still remains a stereotype of  the West.  ¹²

Globalization has compounded this narrative, nostalgia, stereotype, and beauty. Gut response to beauty is not the same thing as significance. This is not to say, however, that this Big West is entirely without meaning.  ¹³

A place as varied as the West, and a process as complex as its history, can never be captured in a single definition. When it comes to the western landscape, the question remains as to whose West we are talking about and what West we are choosing to focus on.  ¹⁴

The impact of globalization on the American Southwest has helped to create the complexity of the region while at the same time preserving its simplicity.

CHAPTER 2. SPIRITUALITY and RELIGION.

The globalization of Christianity impacted the Natives of the American Southwest. However, long before a single Christian ever set foot in the West, preconceptions existed about the Garden of Eden or Paradise. For centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Europeans believed in a definite location of this paradise. When Columbus set out and discovered the New World, he assumed he had also found the Garden of Eden. But those preconceptions changed. By the time the Europeans marched into the Southwest, they considered the Natives there to be heathens, that is, people who were unenlightened and lacked culture and moral principles.

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GARDEN of EDEN and PARADISE

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Renaissance Europeans brought to the New World their collective memories of the popular literature of their day. This form of literature was the romantic novels posing as history. In the popular imaginations of pre-Renaissance Europeans, the lines between fantasy and reality blurred. Medieval Europeans believed in the existence of enchanted islands, Amazons, and fountains of youth beyond the horizon of the earth.  ¹⁵

Indeed, Europeans dreamed of mysterious lands to the West, centuries before Columbus was even born. The places they imagined were inhabited by the fabulous races of mankind, bizarre men and women unlike any known in the Old World. Although those people might be frightening, their land would be a paradise.  ¹⁶

The Christians of the sixteenth century had sailed and traveled beyond the known limits of their intellectual experience. They experienced geography in New World regions that did not fit their conceptions of history, theology, or the nature of man. Trying to understand a strange new world required a mental flexibility that engaged and defied the best European minds. Indeed, rather than upset their traditional categories and expectations, the earliest European explorers and scholars described America’s plants and flowers in words of their own. In this way, they turned the strange into the familiar, rendering an unfamiliar world into a conventional one.  ¹⁷

Columbus believed that he had found Paradise-on-Earth, the Garden of Eden, which was believed to have been located in the Far East. Columbus made his first reference to Eden in his diary on February 21, 1493.  ¹⁸

Some anthropologists who identify past indigenous peoples insist that past and (and perhaps present) indigenous peoples were gentle and ecologically wise stewards of their environments, who knew and respected Nature, and innocently lived in a Garden of Eden.  ¹⁹

Columbus believed that he had arrived in the area near or about India. He believed that the Garden of Eden was located near India. This concept, this belief, impacted the Natives of the Southwest.

In the second or third century, Julius Valerius translated an earlier Greek work by Pseudo-Callisthenese, which followed a trend of thought placing non-Christian people living in Eden in a region located in or near India. This work was The Exploits of Alexander the Great. Alexander in his conquests had reached areas as far east as India.  ²⁰

Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Plutarch wrote about a distant place in the West, somewhere beyond the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean, describing it in idyllic terms of perfect rainfall, soft dews, fertile soil, and abundant food.

In 630, St. Isidore of Seville in his work, the Etymologiae, placed Paradise in the Far East near India.  ²¹

The Venerable Bede, who lived from 672 to 735, was the primary historian of the English people. He was also a theologian who was familiar with the writings of earlier theologians. Bede placed Eden in a location far from the civilization of Europe, according to his Hexameron.  ²²

Beginning in 1096, the Crusades had made Europe aware that geographic regions near Jerusalem were not able to support the lush vegetation required by Paradise. By the next century, The Relation of Enoch and Elias stated that Paradise, therefore, had to be located in India.  ²³

In 1225, the Italian Giovanni de Paolo painted his Expulsion: God expelling Adam and Eve from Paradise. In that painting, the world was made up by the triad of Europe, Africa, and Asia. The New World, as yet undiscovered, was not included as a continent. Because of the rise of early capitalism, European explorers, missionaries, and traders pushed further toward the Far East, beyond the traditional boundaries of the Holy Land. As a result, Eden gradually moved east with the missionaries and commercial travelers. In the wake of this migration, Marco Polo made his own contributions to travel literature. He was an Italian trader and traveler to Asia and China. His book, Description of the World, allowed Columbus to estimate the distance between Spain and Asia.  ²⁴

In 1325, an anonymous Middle English poem describes Eden as being in India. In 1357, a popular account of Eden’s location is found toward the end of the fictional Travels of Sir John Mandeville, by a French monk of the same name who never traveled anywhere. This belief in the location of Paradise