The Railroad and the Southwesternist View

During the 1890s journalist and photographer Charles F. Lummis created the philosophical basis for Southwestern tourism by combining images of Native peoples and geological sights into a traveler's vision of New Mexico. Just as the travel literature of this period created a mythic, "Orientalist" view of North Africa and the Middle East, Lummis created a "Southwesternist" view of New Mexico. He exoticized the sights and peoples of New Mexico through an eclectic mix of euphoric praise and adverse criticism.

The end of the nineteenth century was a time of rapid cultural change in the Native American communities and Hispanic villages of New Mexico. Expanded networks of government-sanctioned Indian traders, combined with the arrival of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway and the Atlantic and Pacific Railway brought the beginnings of market economies to the reservations and remote villages. The arrival of rail transportation symbolized the arrival of Modernism in New Mexico, and the beginning of the end of New Mexico's cultural and artistic isolation.