James H. Cox

The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico

In Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico, James H. Cox analyzes mid-twentieth-century American Indian novels, plays, and histories that center on indigenous Mexico. Cox’s thorough historical, biographical, and cultural contextualization firmly grounds his analysis of these authors’ southward gaze. Critics of American Indian literature, with some exceptions, have previously described these authors as isolated and passive. Cox counters, however, that the literary production of Todd Downing (Choctaw), Rollie Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D’Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish and Kootenai), among others, “coheres in its contemplation of the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of the settler-colonial nation on the other side of the United States’ . . . southern border” (2). Adopting Rachel Adams’s concept of “indigenous transnationalism” (20), Cox explicates the imaginary global reconfiguring these authors undertake. “By mapping an indigenous American world that existed prior to the colonial era and that continues to span settler-colonial national borders,” he asserts, “these authors produce an indigenous American transnational or transborder imaginary” (19). Cox points out that, for Downing, Riggs, and McNickle, Mexico is a model of political and cultural revolutionary transformation. Because indigenous Mexicans far outnumber American Indians, these writers “optimistically, but at times inaccurately, represented this overflow of indigeneity to a U.S. audience as a powerful cultural and political force in Mexico” (8). Red Land to the South persuasively advocates for a more prominent place for mid-twentieth-century authors in the American Indian literary canon. Cox contends that Downing’s detective novels mark Mexico as a site of “neocolonial invasion” by Americans—criminals, tourists, and journalists—and as a vital center of indigenous resistance (27). His often overlooked transnational novels merit recognition as integral works within “Choctaw literary history, an American Indian literature of Oklahoma tradition, and a twentieth-century American Indian literary history where [they] properly belong” (34). This omission, Cox explains, stems from critical standards that exclude American Indian literary works not centered on American Indian identity and cultural traditions, even though some of Downing’s novels actually do fit these criteria. Downing appropriates and