the West as a white myth

This semester we have been addressing the idea of the West as "American Mythology" and looking into the themes and motifs which make up the rules of this genre. Increasingly, however, it appears as if one of these rules is that you must be white, and that the West, as we know it, is not a myth but rather a delusion of white-anglo culture. Both The Plum Plum Pickers and The Surrounded tell the story of the American West from the prospective of an oppressed, indigenous minority: Mexicans fruit-pickers in California and American Indians in the Midwest respectively. In both books we see the attempts of these minority characters to take part in the ideals of the West only to be excluded for their ethnicity. Archilde attempts to enter white culture only to find himself hindered and ultimately undone by his Indian blood. Similarly, Manuel and the other pickers try to better their lives in the spirit of the West through hard work and manly labor. Like Archilde, however, their efforts are thwarted by the white man, in this case Turner, who single-handedly  ends Westward expansion and owns literally everything, preventing Manuel and all the others from ever making anything of themselves. The white perception represented in "classic westerns" casts these minorities as hostile or inept, depending on the mood of the author. In these books, like The Ox-Bow Incident, whites travel West to face the savagery of the wild. They must either fight the demon savages or care for the indolent natives, but either way they are just another obstacle to conquer. The Plum Plum Pickers and The Surrounded offer a different view, that the West is simply a pipe-dream of Eastern, white, redneck, racist, city-slickers, who wantonly attack, displace, and subjugate entire populations in the name of progress.