The paragraphs below are a test of the new structure of Welcome to Truth to Consequences: Place and Place Making in Modern New Mexico. Interrupting the linear chronology of many historical accounts, the attempt here is to establish a thematic structure. In other words, I am going with theme over time.
The narrative I write about Truth or Consequences, the region, the United States of America, and the world, filaments of the larger picture set against the bulky narrative of the town of course, are be shaped by the connection and cycle of events and such rather than a straight shot passage through years. This is the big picture I have glimpsed in my interviews and ethnographic field work. This is only a test.
History is a collection of observations about what possibly occurred, it is not the occurrence itself. All history is a tapestry of qualitative and qualitative assertion. Enough agreement about an event results in the assertion of historical fact. Like scientific findings, facts can be overturned by the presence of more compelling evidence. Miguel Gandert's advise to remember that a photograph is not the thing itself illuminates this tension in history. History is not the event itself, but a story we tell about the event.
No matter how great the effort, there is no history that does not elide and occlude events as equally as it tells a tale of the events that transpired. The tale should be a true one, as far as true can be realized in history as the most plausible combination of the who, when , what, and where and the ever-conjectural and never fully-vetted why. Similar to place, historical truth is always in the process of becoming, never fully realized before it shifts into something else. The following meanders far from history, but it was a fun exercise in the poetic. I will return to the concrete next month, when my interviews resume and I delve into the Museum's archives.
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TEST 1: Theme as Historical Structure.
THEME 1: Diaspora: The movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland
Place is the concentration of countless diasporas. Diaspora is too narrowly imagined as human movements away from homelands. Molten lava, flora and fauna, landmasses, seeds, molecule of dirt and other physical things made their way across the surface of the earth before sentient beings and offspring. People did not migrate first. They were not the the first to claim a geographical territory. The separation of people and the material and physical fragments of place is folly, we are a part of the earth, made from dust and mud in most creation accounts. To separate people from their ancestral places is an even greater folly, but one that has been born by most every people in the modern colonial era of Spanish and American and now gobal systems.
The movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland scatters seeds and earth as well as stories. Stories are where places begin. Nothing has a claim to place without regard for a “before-time.” No place is ever composed of self-originating material. We all come from somewhere, but none of us started here. And yet. We mark beginnings in reference to particular places and homelands. We are born to places, but this is not necessarily the strongest claim to place. Wildly varied in cast, character and content, no story happens without a place. And no place becomes a homeland without stories describing how that place became home.
Culture is place in important ways. Culture is what emerges from long stays in a particular places, and from merging old place habits into new landscapes. Foodways carry place as much as the clothes on a person’s back used to carry place. The loss of the first has created a far greater outcry than the second in contemporary times. The resurgence of interest in local foods accompanies the possibility of regaining some literal ground to farm. Yet the second example of place and culture and the clothes on our back demonstrates how place and culture weave together. The wool worn over by English immigrants carried the story of the loss of common land. Our material culture carries place both literally and figuratively. Captives carry culture; root it in new places where it grows like a story told and retold whose witnesses can no longer testify to the truths of the before days...
Regulated to the backdrop as a stage where history happens, place has been denied an active role in the shaping of people and history in modern tellings. Not always of course. The historical record is a record of movement. This is likely a reason why the old records of people and places, once largely cyclical, are now given over to the linearity of forward movement. Progress replaces old rituals with new ones anew given the slightest chance in modern histories. But there are some ruptures in this linearity. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa provides a different structure and method....
People are born to places and claim them readily, and just as readily other would dispossess people of their land. Boundaries are marked, settlements expand, history is written, war comes and these actions are erased and re-inscribed. “How does the colonial imagination,” asks scholar Annette Rodriquez, “make landscapes teeming with people and settlements into empty places?” The colonial imagination she refers belongs to both Spanish and the American colonizers who spread across North America. The Spanish acknowledged that the lands they sought for golden cities and god glory were otherwise occupied. The Americans embraced the paradox of erasing Native settlement when it suited them, or celebrating the people of the long-settled landscape they claimed through politics, rhetoric and war in bizarre ritual and dress-up. We do that today with the same brutal flourish of fantasy and reverence...
END TEST.
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