El nuevo nuevo viejo oeste. Un paisaje sin lugar

Abstract

El oeste es un mito tradicionalmente estadounidense que tiene entre sus rasgos distintivos la identificación con un determinado paisaje, elemento central en la definición de su significado. Sin embargo, el paisaje del oeste, como construcción cultural, se ha ido transformando a lo largo del siglo XX, asociándose a diferentes territorios, reales e imaginados. El artículo realiza un recorrido por algunas de sus principales reinterpretaciones, desde las primeras formalizaciones ofrecidas por la literatura y las artes de finales del siglo XIX hasta los actuales imaginarios reproducidos por el cine y la televisión. El oeste americano se muestra como un instrumento que sintetiza una determinada interpretación del territorio, la cultura y la sociedad norteamericana, configurando un modo particular de mirar y dotar de sentido a la realidad con la capacidad de adaptarse a diferentes contextos espaciales y temporales.

If a modern myth is intimately connected with a territory, it is the American West. Transmitted by cinema, television, literature or advertising, the American West has transcended its status as a true American cultural reference, which was created at the same time as the historical reality on which it is based would disappear, to become a global topic that can not only be linked to a specific model of a society, but to a certain landscape as well. However, the western myth has not remained unchanged throughout the twentieth century, but it has been adapted to different historical contexts, which have allowed it revives at significant moments in American history not only as a mere fictional entertainment but also as a cultural reference that has been able to change the tangible (territorial) and intangible (social) reality.

This paper aims to introduce and frame a widely known concept in the American context, the “New American West”, that raised from the revision of the original myth, focusing on its interpretation of territories and places. Starting from the shaping of the myth in the fictional westerns, the paper shows the original sources from which its landscape was defined and the characteristics that it represents. For this purpose, some significant stages in American Western history, coinciding with the times in which some huge alterations of the western territory were taken place, are analyzed, showing the new western-landscape representations and their narratives. This research seeks to establish an elemental basis from which the revival of the interest on the western myth and its landscape, both in USA and Europe, can be better understood, but it also reflects on landscape as a powerful tool to help us understand and change our environment.