Days ago, I attended the New Mexico Writers Annual Dinner. It was billed as a networking event, so I signed up months earlier. The chances were slim that I’d encounter a publisher for This Is Not a Crime Story, but I can’t give up. The speaker, Jennifer Givhan, seemed at first brush to be the sort of writer I might rank as third in line if I was to catch her during a jam-packed writing conference. She is a poet; I’m intimidated by people that identify this way. But she was the only one on offer, and she is a writer of many stripes. She spoke about what it meant to be a writer centered in the Southwest, on growing up hearing stories–La Llorona, the vengeful ghost of Mexican folklore, haunted the river that ran behind her house. What hooked me about her was when, while the audience was busy, contentedly scooping bites of tamales from our plates, she mentioned the West Mesa Eleven. They, too, make up the tapestry of stories from the Southwest. In brief, eleven women were found buried in 2009 in the desert on the West Mesa of Albuquerque, New Mexico, many of them sex workers. There are several suspects, but no one has been charged with the crime. A dark chapter in local history. But it is only adding to the horror if these woman are erased, if their stories are considered too disturbing to recount.
From my limited experience of consuming literature from the Southwest, much of it doesn’t touch on the dark underbelly of the place. Authors, in essays in journals, use a soft-focus lens, dare I say they romanticize the locale, the place they call home. Who can blame them? Don’t we all want to see our childhood days as nostalgic? And I’m sure this magical upbringing of which these authors speak was real. I just can’t help feeling after I put down these articles that there is more to the story, something left out. As if the authors thought through what to include in their stories, and when it came to the uncomfortable bits, they yanked the handle on the trap door and let them fall away. Perhaps this assumption–that everyone’s life is rocky in parts–is faulty. Or the belief that it is the duty of the writer to include the less flattering parts of his experience.
But I suspect it is a case of desert folks don’t want to air their dirty laundry. I know in my Catholic home we tried to project to the church folks that we were a vision of the perfect Christian family. Maybe that is what is underneath this best face forward literary bent. Nothing like this transpires in the newspapers, thankfully. There is no shortage of front page news here in New Mexico: child abuse, gun violence, domestic cruelty. It’s not necessary to immerse yourself in bad news, but we shouldn’t run from it either.
