ABSTRACT
The African American cultural and political reawakening of the 1920s and 1930s, frequently referred to as the Harlem Renaissance but also as the New Negro movement, played out in other parts of the nation including the desert Southwest particularly in the states of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and the far western portion of Texas. This section of the nation included the cities of Albuquerque, El Paso, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Tucson. Remote and isolated from major centers of population such as Kansas City, Chicago, New York, and Boston, to some extent the cultural renaissance in the Southwest took its own shape, but it was patterned after that of the nation’s larger cities. In form and substance it was, not surprisingly, more like the renaissance in other western cities than that of the East Coast.
