Locating Mexicans in The Song of the Lark

Sarah Clere University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In her 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, Cather imagines the town of Moonstone, Colorado as a relief map in various colors of sand. Such a map “could easily have indicated the social classifications of Moonstone, since these conformed to certain topographical boundaries, and every child understood them perfectly” (SL 31). On the very outskirts of this imaginary map, far from the fashionable part of town and bounded by a deep ravine, is “Mexican Town.” The presence of a Mexican community within the pages of The Song of the Lark is, for Cather, a unique depiction of a nonwhite community in a novel with a relatively contemporary setting.1 This community’s most visible member is Juan Tellamentez, known affectionately to the townspeople as “Spanish Johnny.” Spanish Johnny and “Mexican Town” allow Thea to explore cultural difference within a narrative and historical context that does not threaten her own centrality. Ultimately, Thea’s experiences in “Mexican Town” prove to be a catalyst for an examination of her loyalty to family and community and its potential opposition to the requirements of art. Despite the centrality of Thea’s experience as a mediating factor in The Song of the Lark, Johnny and his community emerge as more than simply a useful plot device. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said confronts the fraught project of addressing the political dimensions of high culture: “It is difficult . . . to make observations about art that preserve its unique endowments and at the same time map its affiliations, but I submit we must attempt this and set the art in the global, earthly context” (7). Mapping Cather’s affiliations has been the basis of a number of ongoing scholarly conversations among her critics. Margaret O’Connor has termed her “a regionalist of many regions” (815), and indeed Cather does set her dozen novels in an extraordinary variety of locales. In The Song of the Lark, Thea’s hometown Moonstone’s Colorado setting belies its similarity to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where

150 Sarah Clere

Cather lived from the age of nine until she left for the University of Nebraska at sixteen. As Susan Rosowski and others have noted, Cather returned to her Midwestern roots in The Song of the Lark even more thoroughly than she did in O Pioneers. The novel has numerous autobiographical components, including the use of a vernacular Midwestern narrative voice, a departure for Cather. The presence of such a “highly-particularized, personal point of view” (74), to use Susan Rosowski’s phrase, and the novel’s wealth of detail encourage an initial look at Cather’s biography for the genesis of Spanish Johnny and The Song of the Lark’s Mexican community. Willa Cather traveled to Arizona to visit her brother Douglass in April of 1912, a mere two months after that state joined the United States—the last of the contiguous forty-eight states to do so. Cather’s first visit to the Southwest thus coincided with the delineation of the U.S.-Mexican border and the establishment of the Southwest as an irrevocably American and (in theory at least) English-speaking territory. James Woodress notes in the Prologue to his 1987 biography that her letters from this trip are “filled” with stories of a handsome and charismatic young Mexican man named Julio (6). A few clear correlations exist between Cather’s time with Julio and events in The Song of the Lark. Julio, like Spanish Johnny, was a musician. The Mexican dance and serenade Thea attends with Spanish Johnny and the Ramas brothers is drawn from the dances she attended with Julio, and the music Julio and his friends performed for her (Lewis 82, Woodress 6). Julio also transcribed folksongs for Cather, just as Spanish Johnny does for Thea in The Song of the Lark. Woodress claims that “Cather never found occasion in her later career to put Julio in a novel, unless there is a bit of him in Spanish Johnny in The Song of the Lark” (7). Edith Lewis says of Julio, “He is Spanish Johnny from The Song of the Lark, and the Mexican part of the book is, I think, entirely taken from this time” (82). Complicating Spanish Johnny’s antecedents is a letter Cather wrote to S.S. McClure stating (in Janis Stout’s paraphrase) “she is glad he likes ‘Spanish Johnny’ who is a real person she knew as a child.” Stout dates this letter March 13, 1912, adding a question mark (Stout 217). James Woodress refers to what must be the same letter, claiming “Spanish Johnny was a guitar-playing Mexican who lived in Red Cloud” (267). Woodress identifies the letter’s date as February 1, 1915 (537 n. 267). But Stout’s date appears to be the correct one, since the letter also refers to the stroke suffered by Isabelle McClung’s mother. Cather