ABOUT
Mythic Southwest is a blog coming from the boundary of the United States and Mexico: Southwest Texas, published by Dr. Francine K. Ramsey Richter, Associate Professor of English at Sul Ross State University: Rio Grande College.
The Texas Ranch.net is also home of the 49 year old book review journal Books of the Southwest: Reviews of Current Southwestern Americana, and the indepedent film and music company Texas Ranch Productions, whose first film Road to El Paso will be on the international film festival circuit in 2007.
The environment, much like artistic life here, gets very little rain. And yet, art has survived, even thrived here for centuries. We honor those who have lived and died here in the Southwest, the myriad cultures who silently bled for land, life, and art. The Southwest has been and is home to native, ancient, displaced, migrant populations. The mythology and art of the Southwest speaks across the centuries, and the stories it tells are important to all humankind.
And here, on-line, we are continuing this ancient communitas, for those who see that out of the desert, out of the harshest of environments, can come beautiful life. Art as life.
Here you are invited to offer comments on book reviews, essays, read submissions by authors publishing from and on the Southwest. We invite you to check back for more installments.
You are also invited to watch for the movie trailer from Texas Ranch Productions‘ upcoming independent film Road to El Paso.
We call it the Mythic Southwest because we live in a culture formed by a vast, ancient mythology–from the Indians whose lives were inextricably tied to place, to the Spanish, the French, the Mexicans, the Anglos, the Europeans, and Ancient Iberians who lived and loved it just as well. Not to mention the countless lives of animals who call it home. To live here is sometimes to feel displaced by the general scope of American history, but we see this as a good thing. For on the boundaries is where the most daring of lives can be lived, where the story can be told by those who lived it. We’d like to emulate those passionate enough to call this home in our carrying on the tradition of the vast Southwest. We’d like to live it as passionately as those before and around us.
We work within this existing mythology also to expand the story: life in the Southwest can no longer only be seen internationally as the rugged patriarchal individual against the land, as a vast number of books published on this topic will readily show you the endless array of other equally important voices. We try to highlight these in Books of the Southwest. These books offer insight into this magnificent part of the world. Don’t get us wrong, we also love heroes, those fresh from the fight, who shaped the image in the American imagination of what it means to be here. But there is a new story being told in the Southwest. It is at once an ancient and a new story of mythic proportions.
Shiloh Richter, M.A.
3 May 2006
