SOURCE: “Natives and Others,” in New York Review of Books, March 26, 1987, pp. 32–36.

In the following excerpt, Adams explores the issue of ethnic identity in Bless Me, Ultima.

Nobody in Santa Fe really belongs there unless his line stretches back, by one genealogical trapeze act or another, to the seventeenth century; so my wife and I—native New Yorkers both—have adapted without strain to being outsiders and aliens. Who doesn't feel like a transplant in America? Here there's nothing else to be. It's an oasis culture; nobody gets much more than his minimal quota of earth, air, and water, and who needs more? Every so often, just to make contact with our fellow transients, we drive down the valley of the Rio Grande to the flat marshlands of Bosque del Apache, south of Socorro, some 140 miles from our house in Santa Fe. Into these wide lagoons and stagnant...