Land of (Re)Enchantment: Tourism and Sacred Space at Roswell and Chimayó, New Mexico

Abstract

By 1922, year he would turn thirty-seven years old, British author and world traveler D. H. Lawrence was exhausted spiritually and emo- tionally. While he had seen a great deal of world and appreciated some of beauty and wonder he had found, he had never experienced what he considered to be a moment of true transcendence. Lawrence was feeling crush of urbanization and industrialization, in which, as he puts it, there is no mystery left, we've been there, we've seen it, we know all about it, (and) Peking is just same as New York.1 Lawrence had witnessed all, felt absolutely nothing, and despaired of ever making a connection with any of beautiful lands he had seen, or would see. Then he traveled to New Mexico. Lawrence's sojourn in New Mexico placed him in a category of revi- talization and rebirth with many other spiritual pilgrims who have come to Land of Enchantment. He called his time in New Mexico the greatest experience of outside world I have ever had. The landscape was more than regenerative and aesthetic: it had a splendid silent ter- ror, and in a grand flourish he noted, Ah, yes, in New Mexico heart is sacrificed to sun and human being is left stark, heartless, but undauntedly religious.2 Lawrence was far from first person to equate New Mexican landscape with sacred and transcendent. Before Spanish conquest, Native Americans venerated land. In 1500s, Spanish arrived and set to work converting Indians, but they also noted beauty of desert landscape. Then United