Introduction:
The Reality of the World
January
First
The
year's doors open
like
those of language,
toward
the unknown.
Last
night you told me:
tomorrow
we
shall have to think up signs,
sketch
a landscape, fabricate a plan
on
the double page
of
day and paper.
Tomorrow,
we shall have to invent,
once
more,
the
reality of this world...[1]
What do people do with places? When place
is documented with stories, myths and language, or marked with ribbons and
trophies, when place is surveyed, mapped and fenced, painted, tagged or
photographed, do we, as Octavio Paz muses, invent the reality of the world?.
Common and wide-ranging, place is a powerful concept. Place can be a physical
location or imagined one. Place is used to describe social standing, ranking,
or order. Place can be a singular reference to a specific thing or it can be a
sweeping generality of that specificity. Place can be described as a feeling of
not belonging in a place. Place is a contemporary paradox, simultaneously seen
as more and as less important. In a world where technology radically
reconfigures place ideas and where the movement of people, capitol and goods is
ever-increasing, a world where people will increasingly not be put into ‘their
place,’ the tremendous disparities in material conditions and increasing tensions
and violence across the world serve to both strengthen borders, rankings and
standings even as they become more vulnerable. Anthropologist Keith Basso’s
call at the end of last century for more studies on what people make of places was
premised on these ideas.[2]
He writes about “this unsettled age,” “when large portions of the earth’s
surface are being ravaged by industrialism…when on several continents
indigenous peoples are being forcibly uprooted by wanton encroachments upon
their homelands…” Basso names legal challenges brought by American Indian
tribes to protect sacred sites from further destruction and the excellent work
on place by philosophers and poets as reasons to study place, as well as the fundamental
contribution place makes to the formation of personal and social identities as
reasons to study place. The urgency of radical environmental challenges and the
contrast of living condition in this “disordered time” are the final examples
in long and unsettling elliptical-filled sentence which is this this chapter’s
opening paragraph.[3]
Basso follows the sweeping list of
trials and challenges with a more lighthearted exploration of how adept people
are at creating richly lived and sensed places, and how deeply attached people are
to their places. He claims that attachments to the relationships represented,
enacted and embodied in the physical landscape are profound. “For surely as
place is an elemental existential fact, sense of place is a universal genre of
experience,” he writes, musing that transcultural qualities might be uncovered
through place ethnographic research.[4]
But he goes on to say that “everything, or almost everything, hinges on the
particulars,” says Basso, “and because it does, ethnography is essential.”[5]
The term transcultural is perhaps a more useful concept than universal. Claims
of universal experiences or qualities are suspect in the current academic
fashion, yet the desire to find qualities that transcend the particular, to find
patterns in the particulars that are shared across time, and place, has a
strong pull. As philosopher Casey Stevens reminds us, we nothing without place,
and in this urgency of challenge and opportunity, the study of place is
well-headed? [6]
In the two decades since Basso the call to study what people “make of places” a
lot of work has been done.[7]
Scholars strive to establish taxonomies and type, and the work in place studies
in the last two decades erodes Basso’s charge that “ethnographic inquiry into
cultural constructions of geographical realities is at best weakly developed.”[8]
Basso’s subsequent work with Steven Feld is one example. Together they edited Senses of Place (1996), a collection of
research first presented of a conference at the Santa Fe School for Advanced
Research. Place ethnographies, they write, seek to "locate the intricate
strengths and fragilities that connect places to social imagination and
practice, to memory and desire, to dwelling and movement.”[9]
This work originally emerged from Basso’s
call to make haste in the study of places.
Welcome to Truth or Consequences:
Place and Place Making on Modern New Mexico, is an exploration of people’s
ideas about place. It mixed method work, part is an ethnographic study of the
town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and part historic inquiry into what
people make of places in the larger southwest region beginning from roughly the
turn of the 19th century. Using ethnographic and historic methods as well as the
theoretical lens of critical regionalism, I heed Basso’s call for further study
on what people make of places, stretching this question to include what people
do with places. What we do with places, how we make them, establish them as
measures, narrate them in poetry, fiction, order them through survey and
mapping, how we move to them, through them and away from them, how we commemorate
them, attach and inscribe meaning into them—these are the types of questions
that shape this work.
On a practical level, knowledge of place
is often a matter of survival. This trait, which apparently receded in the last
century, has revived in light of environmental crisis. In many ways place is
culture. A reflection of our material and bounded habitats, whether tangible or
imagined, place reflections are evident in clothing, dance, food, kinship
structures, built environments, spiritual practice, geolocational arrangements,
ritual, ornamentation and even skin pigmentation of and arrangement of facial
features and bodies. These characteristics persist and adapt in the
contemporary world of movement, dislocation, contest and collusion. People also
narrate place traditions into being. Depicted from a distance and often infused
with longing to create what they have imagined in places unseen, these
narratives are a mainstay in the southwest region and across the world. Cultural
appropriation, performances of cultural created for the tourist gaze and
consumer goods based on fictitious imaginings are similarly mainstays of the
global and local landscapes of place. These place narratives, cultural
creations and performances of all kinds are as telling as any historical
account of place that strives to portray objective reality.
Against emerging arguments of placeless
world, where every place looks the same, or a borderless world, is an increased
awareness of what historian and architect Delores Hayden calls the power of
place. The power of place is generally cast as a positive expression. Place
commemorations and celebrations are a mainstay of global tourism and place
revitalization. Preserving cultural landscapes or sites considered integral to
dominant understandings of important history and cultural expression is a
popular cure to the supposed flattening effects of globalization. The power of
place is often evoked as a tool to combat the steady domination of ubiquitous
commercial strips and capital-driven touristscapes with supposedly authentic
cultural expressions. Violent histories are obscured or occluded in many
cultural landscapes. It is often the desire to be in “authentic” places that
drives commodification and entrenches borders, from nations to hotel compounds. Where a body is placed is a powerful indicator
of poverty, violence and exclusion. Critical renderings of place entail greater
considerations of these forces. Hayden’s book has appeals to a popular audience.
There is a growing body of work written
for popular audiences, which speaks how these ideas manifest themselves outside
of the academy. James Howard Kunstler provides a scathing indictment of place
and landscape in an automobile dominated post-WWII landscape. Kunstler
characterizes the built environment of the last fifty years as “depressing, brutal,
ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading…the whole destructive, wasteful,
toxic, agoraphobic-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call ‘growth.’”[10] He argues that many individuals must share these
sentiments but lack the vocabulary to articulate what went wrong with the world
around them. The sweeping history Kunstler presents is fairly uncritical in the
academic sense and passing rude. There are, for example, his assertion that
J.B. Jackson, a former professor at UNM and resident of New Mexico whose work
influences my own considerably, lacked critical facilities in his cultural
landscape studies because of his failure to assertively criticize the
vernacular mess of automobile-dominated landscapes. Kunstler also make a passing remark about
Jackson’s time spent in New Mexico, “where, except for the Indian pueblo’s, the
towns were all brand-new and uninfected by the viruses of history.” I would counter that Santa Fe, to cite one
example in dozens, is quite infected. But these damning critiques aside, the
text is one in a growing body of popular literature written specifically about
place that is attracting an ever-growing audience. Kunstler’s TED talk about
these ideas is ranked in the top 100 on the site.
The history Kunstler provides looks to
everything from the rational, mathematical, abstracted and
topographically-immune patters of the grid-system that forged the first deep
pattern of settlement across newly wrested U.S. territory, to fashion, world
fairs and industrial building techniques to emerging ideas about how to build
more meaningful, and shared, places. “We want,” Kunstler writes in his closing,
“to feel that we truly belong to a specific part of the world.”[11] Joel Kotkin offers a different vision but
with a similar message. He focuses on the technological reshaping of the American
landscape, a paradigm that is rapidly replacing the economic and social
geographies that defined the last century. “The digital revolution,” he writes,
“not only accelerates the speed at which information is processes and
disseminated, it also restates the relation of space and time within our
communities.”[12] Kotkin sees the challenges faced by
communities as opportunities to build grassroots activism, to remake places,
and to re-inscribe the values of shared space, with the addition of digital
technology that will add new dimensions to these exchanges. Richard Florida, as
a last example of the popular place texts of today and champion of the
‘creative class,’ offers Who's Your
City?: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important
Decision of Your Life (2008). The title explains a lot about the text,
which as a critical scholar I found to be full of specious argument. As a
statistician I took great unbridged with the ways that his survey results were
presented. Florida is convinced in his argument that if you can find the right
place, everything that could possible make you happy will follow. This does not
bode well for the majority of the world’s population without the freedom of
mobility Florida’s creative class seems to possess. These texts demonstrate the
ways that place has entered the popular consciousness.
This introduction chapter begins with a
review of the methods and scholarship
that shape and inform this work, beginning with the concept of place. It
concludes with an overview of the region that forms the real and imagined
geographical sweep known as the Southwest and an introduction to Truth or
Consequences, New Mexico, the town at the center of this study. Chapter Two
explores the ways that the region was narrated, surveyed and imagined as plans
for reclamation in the southwest moved forward and cumulated in the building of
Elephant Butte Dam, which in the early 1900s was the second largest dam project
in the world. The building of the dam marked the first boom of the tiny and
scattered settlement that became the town of Truth or Consequences. Water
carries the story of place through this chapter, from its role in the formation
of a regional imaginary to the centrality of the hot mineral water in the
establishment of the town formerly known as Hot Springs. Chapter Three begins
with a reflection on the historical accounts of the Apache in the region, and
the anomaly of the area in comparison to the rest of New Mexico because of both
the Apache stronghold and the physical difficulty the terrain presented to
colonial Spanish movement through this area. Looking at narrative, survey and
fictional accounting of place, this chapter continues to focus on how places
are narrated and settled, as well as how place identities emerge and are
reshaped, often mythically and without recourse to the historical record. In
their colonizing march across the Southwest, the Spanish skirted this region
and traveled along the Jornada Del Muetro, a segment of the Camino Real del
Adentro named for its brutal traversal though the arid plain east of the Rio
Grande. Chapter Four explores travel, movement, dislocation and cultural
contests in the region as the town moves into the business of space travel and forging
new place identities. Woven into the narratives of Chapter’s Two, Three and Four
are observations from the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the town of Truth
or Consequences and surrounding area, including 68 interviews, a research blog documenting
close to two years of ethnographic research in the town, and place photographs,
a medium that will received extensive analysis in the consideration of place
and place making.
Part I: A Study of
Place
Corner
of 5th and Central
my
name is Kevin
rhymes
with heaven
I’m
the most photographed
homelessman
in town
contrary
to what
the
bible thumpin’ Jesus servants
told
me
I
am not lost.
I
am on the corner of 5th & Central
albuquerque,
new mexico
united
states of America
northern
hemisphere
Place
is defined in this work as a dynamic and constantly shifting configuration of
forces that describe location. The location
may be the interior emotional landscape of a person who feels out of place. The
location may be a sacred site, located in both physical and spiritual realms.
The location may be a photograph on the social media site Instagram, enhanced
with filters and special effects. The location may be my childhood home, on the
west mesa of Albuquerque at the corner of 98th and Central. The location
may be a standing, such as second place, working class, gender affiliation,
stranger, old timer or newcomer. The place may be a state of euphoria or the
state of New Mexico. None of these examples are static. The constellation of
influences comprising place is fluid, and attempts to talk about a place or
place identity is therefore an attempt to do two things. The first is to name
these forces. The second is to describe or discern what kind of place emerges
when these forces temporarily coalesce. Houses are built and torn down, gender
barriers fall, even directional maps based on magnetic north must be redrawn
and recalculated due to shifts in the earth’s magnetic poles. Ranging from topography
to global capital markets, these forces are physical, political, cultural and
historical. They are also expressions of shared social engagements, cultural
mores, infrastructure, narratives and myths. Many of the forces have a persistent
influence over generations, which in turn keep many of the larger patterns in
place until these patterns are disrupted by other forces.
Because place is such a ranging concept this
work focuses on place as narrative, including geographical place and place
identities, and place making. There is considerable overlap in these processes.
Place narratives are defined as the ways places are described. Place narratives
can be understood as ways that place is documented. Geographical place narratives,
for example, include the political or communal work of recording, surveying and
mapping patterns in the landscape such as settlement, infrastructure, and the built
environment, terrain, resources and other physical and material characteristics.
A geographical place narrative can range from knowledge of edible plants and
water sources, complied by generations and passed on orally to the development
of a Cartesian land survey system. The process of how places are described includes
what is said and written about places, imagined and fictionalized, but also includes
what is recorded, rendered visually into paintings and photographs, and
otherwise documented. This is not just physical documentation, although I use
geographical place narratives as ready example. The ‘wrong side of the tracks,’
for example, is a place narrative that speaks to settlement patterns as well as
poverty. It is a phrase with history in America, speaking to cultural rankings
and to land policies. To call someone out as being from the wrong sides of the
tracks puts them into a particular place in the social ranks of a
community. Places identities are wrought
out of place narratives. Place identity is defined as a dominant place
understanding. Place identities are strongly shaped by understandings of particular
place narratives coming together, along with the coalescence of other forces
that create place, such as economic and political forces. The aridity of the
southwest for example, part definitional truth and part fiction, is a dominant
place identity throughout the Southwest, despite vast differences in climate,
terrain, rainfall, and landscape in the region.
The historical method and place
ethnography are the two methods engaged in this work. The records examined in
this study include newsprint, historic photographs, surveys, archival and
government documents. Narrative accounts of place abound in historic sources.
Contrasting place histories and narratives taken from promotional material and travel
guides to those taken from US Army Corp of Engineer surveys and topographic maps
provide an insight into places in ways that are both vastly different and
unsettlingly similar. Considering why places are narrated in particular ways
illuminates why claims to definitive place histories and identities are so
powerful. Veracity is not necessarily the point of this interrogation. Many important
place narratives cannot be historically verified or are blatant fictions. Why
do certain stories persist, like the idea of areas hot springs as a noncombat
zone of peaceful interaction and harmony? The idea of area Apache laying down
arms for a relaxing soak with other travelers at the turn of the century is an
image is as wistfully retold as it is almost comical in its naivety. Like a
series of snapshots capturing glimpses of place at particular moments, the
historical record in story, print, photo or other documentation is one way to
know a place, but anecdotal accounts and outright fictions are often as telling
as the accounts documented in the archival records that can be substantiated by
multiple sources. Town historian Sherry Fletcher, who I spent countless days
with during my field work in Truth or Consequences, calls it the ‘Geronimo
Slept Here’ narrative. It is a particular kind of place narrative she finds
infuriating. She is, as I have noted in
my research blog, a stickler for well-documented and verifiable historical
accuracy. We have had many conversations
about why I am so fascinated with the persistence of certain stories in
historical and contemporary place narratives.
The most recent Sierra County Tourist
Guide, for example, contained a story on Lozen, sister to Apache chief Victorio
and a warrior in her own right, according to oral interviews gathered by Eve
Ball. This story is recounted in Chapter Three, but included here to illustrate
the interplay between my methods. I traced the fictional narrative to a
collection of southwest fables and ghost stories, without footnotes, which was
cut and paste in its entirety into the tourist guide. In brief, the story
claims that Lozen falls in love with a confederate deserter who later dies
(from a snakebite, perhaps, or killed in a battle protecting or even leading
his ‘adopted’ people?). Heartbroken, she elects to never marry. One of the
RV-living snowbirds I interviewed and asked about the story said she adored
living in the ‘real west’ and thought the blatant fiction about doomed love
between and Indian maiden and a brave and principled deserter of war back east
was a great story regardless of whether it was true or not. The guide’s editor
did not respond to my queries. A newspaper article from the local paper
published not long after the guide, also about Lozen, quoted a fictional western
novel as though it was part of the historical record. These stories illustrate
the ways that the area and its people continued to be romanticized in
disturbing and troubling ways, reinforcing Sherry’s views that these fictions
are dangerous and damaging. It also illustrates the powerful interplay between
ethnography and historical methods. Historic methods dominate my second chapter
on the reclamation movement in the southwest.
My final two chapters employ place
ethnography, which is a combination of traditional methods, such as interviews
and observations, coupled with approaches such as empirical observations on public
space use and policy analysis, phenomenological methods from architecture that
seek to capture the experience and elements of that consciousness-based
experience of a place, as well as photography, site sketching, and other
documentation techniques. I draw these specific methods from a rich body of
critical and historical approaches employed for qualitative data collection.
Fieldwork is the primary means of data collection. Interviews are the
foundation for this study, coupled with a range of other methods such as physical
landscape and cultural use patterns, site sketching, and photo documentation of
the physical and built environment, visual analysis and interpretation of
artifacts in the landscape, the setting and relationship of buildings and the
movement of people. Cultural landscape documentation seeks to capture the
patterns of human shaping of the physical environment, and the ways in which
the physical environment shapes cultural norms and patterns. A final component
of my data collection is social mapping, the documentation of relationships
between groups, institutions, organizations, social structures as well as the
relationships between people, things and places.
Emerging from the ethnographic method,
place ethnography moves place to the center of consideration in research rather
than treating place as stage, backdrop, or static location where events unfold.
This multidisciplinary method reflects a growing body of research and
scholarship on place. While place ethnography as a general research framework
has developed independently in several fields, it is most closely associated
with space and place studies in anthropology and geography. (Hubbard, Kitchin
and Valentine 2004, Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003). Edward T. Hall is often
credited for laying the groundwork for anthropological place and space studies.
Hall coined the term proxemics, defined as the study of human use of space
within cultural contexts. In The Hidden Dimension (1966), Hall argued
that human perceptions of space are shaped by culture, as opposed to a shared
or universally equivalent empirical sensory experience. Hall argued that these
unique if overlapping cultural frameworks for delimiting and organizing space
were learned and internalized, and as such largely unrecognized. Hall explored
and analyzed personal space in order to theorize the ways that these frameworks
were evident in the organization of shared space. Edward Soja’s Potmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of
Space in Critical Social Theory (1986) noted this trend to foregrounding
locality in critical theory research and scholarship and argued that the critical
assessments of how space and place operate were necessary in order to
understand issues such as globalization. Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga, noting the
renewed interest in place and space in the 1990s, pointed out that anthropological
inquiry into the role of the built environment emerged with the first
formalization of theories of cultural evolution during the 19th century and
that “the built environment in anthropological research can be traced to the
earliest endeavors in social and cultural theory, and in ethnography.”[14]
Looking to the work of scholars such as Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Franz
Boas, Amos Rapoport and others, Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga explore the development
of ethnographic and other approaches to the study of the built environment.
Phillip B. Gonzales also remarks on the
growing body of critical research and scholarship on place generated in the
humanities. “Addressed by all of the social and cultural academic fields,”
argues Gonzales, and “the concept of place has come to signify the special
qualities of any bounded and identifiable human habitat, including imagined
ones.”[15]
Geographer Yi Fu Tuan many contributions to space and place studies figure
centrally in this work. Tuan claims that “place incarnates the experiences and
aspirations of a people,” and as such, “place is not only a fact to be
explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be
clarified and understood from the perspective of the people who have given it
meaning.”[16]
Scholar, historian and writer and
cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson shaped the development and
trajectory of contemporary cultural landscape studies. Editors Wilson and Groth
note in their introduction to Everyday
America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J.B. Jackson (2003), Jackson’s
pivotal role in the “discovery of everyday built spaces as significant evidence
of social groups, power relations and culture by historians, American studies
scholars, literary critics, and a growing number of anthropologists,
sociologists and social theorists.”[17]
“Place for me is the locust of desire,” says Lucy R. Lippard’s in her first
line of The Lure of the Local: Senses of
Place in a Multicentered Society (1997). The text is storied and evocative,
but perhaps best known for its photographs of place, as whimsical or sacred, as
created, re-made and destroyed, in celebration of the vernacular and fantastic,
the socially prized and the mundane. Lippard’s lyricism sharply contrasts with
David Harvey’s extensive work on place, which is a critical encounter with what
he sees as a sustained tension between the geographical global forces of
capitalism. David Harvey writes that place, “in whatever guise, is like space
and time, a social construct…the only interesting question that can be asked
is: by what social processes is place constructed?”[18]
The contrasts between Lippard and Harvey illustrate the multiple ways scholars
approach the study of place and the tension that these studies bring to the
surface, whether as the locust of desire or as systems of oppression embedded
in the landscape. Basso also illuminates this tension in his urgent call to
study place that is juxtaposed against his argument that in the midst of all of
the threats to places, contest for dignity and recognition of rights in place
are ways places are richly lived and experienced. “People and things,” says
anthropologist James Clifford The
Predicament of Culture (1988), “are increasingly out of place.” Philosopher Edward S. Casey argues that in a
world where “sameness-of place” and a “monoculture based on Western (and, more
specifically, American) economic and paradigms,” the “revitalized sensitivity
to place” makes sense.[19]
Other works on place are introduced this
text. Prior to moving to a consideration of critical regionalism and ideas of
modernity, I end this brief methods and literature review section with an
exploration of Michael Trujillo’s Land of
Disenchantment: Latina/o Identities and Transformations in Northern New Mexico (2009).
In addition to Basso, Trujillo’s work in the Northern New Mexico town of
Española is the other intellectual pillar of this project’s methodology.
Uncomfortably opposed at many junctures, these texts taken together nonetheless
form a framework for my own research. Basso work, hailed as “a classic creative
ethnographic representation” on the book’s back cover strikes a much different
tone. Trujillo, on the other hand, claims his goal is “to challenge ethnography.”[20]
Trujillo employs what he describes as the once-radical and now reasonably
common style of the modernist ethnography. Representations of supposedly
cohesive cultural groups have long been a mainstay of ethnography in New
Mexico. Not merely portrayed as cohesive, but outside of the modern, First
Nation and Nuevomexicana/o communities have long endured the ethnographic gaze.
Basso does not spend much time grappling with this history. According to Basso
the task of ethnographers is to fashion a written account that adequately
conveys his or her understandings of other people’s understandings. It is a
discomforting business abounding with loose ends he claims. Basso argues that with
patience, good humor and perseverance, it is possible to achieve the ethnographer’s
task of determining what expressive acts might mean, and relating them to
larger ideas world. Fashioning accounts they convey ethnographer’s
understanding of other’s understandings is daunting but worthy says Basso. “To
argue otherwise (and there is a bit of that around these days) is to dismiss
ethnography as a valid source of cultural knowledge and turn it into a
solipsistic sideshow, an ominous prospect only slightly less appealing than the
self-engrossed meanderings of those who seek to promote it.”[21]
Trujillo seeks to engage the modernist
ethnography through a series of essays, “a form designed to address such
complex and often-indefinable subjects.”[22] This
form, he claims, captures the dynamic intertexuality between the ethnographic
gaze and the ethnographic archive. Prior representations of cultural groups
loom in any present ethnographic account, yet through this method the
ethnographer admits, much as Basso does, to the challenge of bewilderment and
incomprehension that accompanies observation. Unlike Basso, Trujillo eschews
the “desire to unmask or defrock some larger or deeper truth,” an approach to
ethnographic representation he claims Michael Taussig exemplifies in his work.
Yet Trujillo concedes that even as he strives to recognize the complex, partial
and subjective representations his ethnographic accounts by their very nature
portray, he still seeks “to paint a picture that is somehow more whole than
previous ethnographies.” Basso contends that ethnography, although often
painful and wrenching, is also a great deal of fun. Occasionally, he remarks,
ethnographers “stumble onto culturally given ideas,” that are worthy of wider
attention, attention that places and their sensing deserve. Trujillo, equally
candid, speaks to finding something “sublime and fulfilling,” in exploring the
juxtaposition between the positive and negative, the framework he uses to
interrogate his own ethnographic accounts.
I am often asked why I chose Truth or
Consequences as my ethnographic site, and, simultaneously, if it is because it
is such weird little an anglo/white town.
The idea that T or C’s demographics are different than the rest of the
state is not entirely true, but is pretty interesting. I provide more details
about this in Chapter 4. Partly I chose this place because I attended school
there in the 5th and 8th grades, when I lived with my
grandparents in a small village 20 miles outside of town. I continued to visit
the town, and my grandparents, at least monthly through my college years. We
still have a small home there, which made traveling to the town over the course
of two years affordable. A large part of the reason I chose the town as my site
was an experience I had as an intern for the Office of the State Historian. At
a lecture presented by one of the scholars, I asked if southern New Mexico has
similar patterns to the ones being described. The scholar replied that
“Southern New Mexico has no history,” to the general hilarity of most of the
audience, which included several prominent legislatures from the north. The
largest individual Spanish Land grant was in southern New Mexico, in Sierra
County, which is not, as far as I am aware, a well-known fact. There does seems
to be a strange historical vacancy in the south center of the state, emptiness
between the Native and Spanish colonial imagination of the north and the New
Mexico, Mexico and El Paso borderlands. My grandmother was born and raised on a
ranch outside of Las Cruces. She liked to call Truth or Consequences the
largest unfenced, unsupervised mental institution in the state of New Mexico. I
always thought was a rather mean, but funny, description. People are constantly
mentioning the story about the state’s mental hospital in the 70s and 80s
giving released inmates one-way bus tickets to T or C. Other people ask me
about the serial murderer David Ray when I mention my research. At the farmers
market in Albuquerque, some sustainably-minded couples were curious if I knew
the author of a recent book on urban homesteading reviewed in the LA Times. The
name of the town, of course, comes up in almost every conversation. These ideas,
and many, many more, will be revisited in my ethnographic chapters.
I employ critical regionalism as the
framework for both my historical and ethnographic work. My critical region is the Southwest,
but rather than a given at the start of this study, critical regionalism recognizes
region as a specific and contested historical construction, manifested through
settlement, colonial expansion, migration, legal and political histories,
ecological and environmental characterizations, and other forces. Regionalism,
generally, has re-emerged in cultural studies. In the introduction to Regionalism and the Humanities (2008)
editors Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz claim the regionalist impulse is both
alive and valuable. “Once viewed as a reaction against the forces of modernism,
it has emerged in a globalized world as a repackaged, more aggressive endeavor
to make a claim for the role of place and space—as opposed to gender, race,
ethnicity, class, demography, or other cultural or physical distinctions—in the
effort to understand ourselves…”[23]
The adoption of a critical turn to the study of region operates both in and
against region, an issue that many in this collection note. Although Katz and
Money are quick to note the many critical contestations of region in the study
of region, there is strong romanticism in the idea of region, much as there is
in place. The idea of region, and place, as a reaction against the homogenizing
force of the global is a common thread continues a narrative that region was
once a respite from the crushing might of the nation.
The term critical regionalism was first
employed in the early 1980s by architects Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis.
Their most nuanced overview of critical regionalism in architecture was
presented in Critical Regionalism;
Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (2003). Lefairve and Tzonis
trace the critical regional tradition to the Roman writer, architect and
engineer Vitruvius. It is important to note that the language of architecture,
like any other disciplinary language, is specific and speaks to particular
world views, movements of history, and expectations of scholarship and method.
There are also great convergences. Consider the following characterization of
modernism and postmodernism as architectural styles. “Having pledged to bring
architecture out of a state of stagnation and disrepute due to the reductive,
technocratic, and bureaucratic dogmas of modernism as well as its
indifference—if not hostility towards history and culture—postmodernism enjoyed
a meteoric rise.” To avoid miring
themselves in the modern/postmodern debate, they say, it became “immensely
important to provide a theoretical framework for their presentation, “we
combined the concept of regionalism with the Kantian concept of critical….the
link was intended to distinguish the use of the concept of regionalism, from
its sentimental, prejudiced and irrational use by previous generations.”[24]
The many attempts to get rid of the regionalism as architectural term, lest it
be resurrected and employed as it had been historically, proved to be a futile
effort. The strength of the concept, they surmise, is a reflection of the “ubiquitous
conflicts in all fields—including architecture—between globalization and
international intervention, on the one hand, and local identity and ethnic
insularity, in the other.”[25] The authors make a subtle but damning
critique of the ways critical regionalism has been used uncritically and as a
siren song of sorts to radical narratives, especially by architect Kenneth
Frampton. Most scholars who employ critical regionalism in cultural studies,
however, look to Kenneth Frampton to translate the term from architecture.
Cheryl Temple Herr first explored
Frampton’s “indirect suggestions” for framing comparative critical regionalism
in cultural studies. She notes his critical influences, from Marxist schools of
thought to Hanna Adrent. She writes that “Frampton’s ‘architecture of resistance’
is fertile with possibilities for a critical regionalist analytic practice of
cultural studies.”[26] Temple Herr lays out Frampton’s main
arguments. She begins with his appeal against placelessness and localized
dimensionality, his call for site specificity, his caution against artifice and
in favor of nature (as climate, season and general topography), and his
considerations of the senses. “The
beauty of his system is precisely because it helps us focus on a local of
making that is variously open to Marxism, psychoanalysis, nomadism…(and) is
compatible with insights from a variety of thinkers and schools.”[27] Looking to criticism of Frampton, Temple Herr
wonders of his evocative prose has been taken too literally. I would suggest
that Frampton’s evocative prose translates and paraphrases readily into calls
for critical scholarship, and is part of Temple Herr’s attempt to test out
these complementary elements from various schools in a comparative critical
regional analysis. Douglas Reichert
Powell has also used critical regionalism as a theoretical framework for
cultural study. He notes Frampton’s influence by highlighting Frampton’s critical
regionalism as “a place-conscious poetic,” and claims that his study is an
attempt to adapt Frampton’s idea to the reading and writing of texts. “Architecture,”
Powell continues, “represents an apt site for this inquiry insomuch as its
theory is always oriented towards the creation of place representations; just
as critical regionalism in architecture or planning is devoted to the
production of new kinds of buildings or landscapes, the practice of critical
regionalism terminates not in the production of critique but in the creation of
new texts and images of place.”[28] Powell concludes his initial exploration of
critical regionalism by noting that critical regionalist cultural studies
should be dependent on tactics specific to particular places.
José E. Limón, in “Border Literary
Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism” (2008), noted that Herr and
Powell had the only sustained explorations of critical regionalism to
literary-cultural studies. Limón offers the most thorough definitions of
critical regionalism. “Derived from the architectural thinking of Kenneth
Frampton and a general Western Marxist transition,” he writes, “critical
regionalism is simultaneously a theory, methodology, and praxis for
recognizing, closely examining, fostering, but also linking cultural and
socioeconomic localized identities, especially as these stand in antagonistic,
if also negotiated, relationships with the late capitalistic globalization.”[29] Local
identities are not fixed practices, he notes, but often maintained as distinct
from a “globalizing ‘outside.’” Limón
does stress that these relationships are deeply implicated in geographical
place, but, drawing on Temple Herr, also theorized as relational and comparable
from across local as well as global space. This manifestation of critical
difference, as Limón notes, reflects the “complexity of local cultures in
comparison to others in the world, while recognizing that all are in constant
but critical interaction with the global…an alternative way to render literary
histories….Through the concept of critical regionalism, a case seems to be
developing for a renewal of regionalist thinking, not in any isolated sense but
rather within yet in tension with globalization.”[30]
Walter D. Mignolo’s ideas on modernity
wrap up my introductory discussion on the theoretical foundations of this work.
These ideas are revisited in later chapters as they are employed. Mignolo
sketches a history of modernity that precedes the Enlightenment but also
created the conditions for the seemingly global triumph of Enlightenment ideas.
This began, he argues, with the onset of Spanish colonialism and the “building
of the Atlantic imaginary,” an imaginary “which will become the imaginary of
the modern/colonial world.”[31] He continues, “In the sixteenth century the
colonial difference was located in space… by the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth century, the measuring stick was history and no
longer writing.” The possession of
alphabetic writing as a ranking of “human intelligence and civilization” across
the spaces of the Atlantic gave way to ideas of who lived in the present,
people “with history could write the history of people without.”[32] This,
Mignolo claims, was the triumph of universal value that set up “knowledge and
understanding, epistemology and hermeneutics, those two sides of the
intellectual frontiers of European modernity.”[33] The
binary of Western scientific and rational understandings have shaped our ideas
of nature, landscape, and the environment. Technology in many cases compounds
these understandings, where natural, rural or primitive landscapes come up
against engineered, urban or rational (plotted, gridded, or otherwise fixed and
known) landscapes. The tools of modernity included the classification of the
planet in the in the modern/colonial imaginary. Mignolo defines this imaginary
as “all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving of the world.”[34] Place is, perhaps, one of our important
imaginaries and at the turn of the century it was being radically challenged by
a new modern/colonial imaginary.
Yi Fu Tuan’s elegant description of language
and landscape extends this argument somewhat.[35]
Tuan also describes what I consider the making of a modern imaginary beginning
with the Spanish arrival in the new world. Tuan argues that questions of how
places are made are at the core of geography, yet scant attention has been paid
to the role of language in the making of place. The habit to see place as the
result of the material transformation of nature is deeply ingrained. Words,
however, have the power to render object and places visible and to give them
character says Tuan. This trait that is readily apparent in the fashioning of
the American Southwest and Tuan outlines three approaches to speech and place,
beginning with the nature of language itself. The second approach requires a
focuses on the use and effectiveness of speech and social contexts. The third
approach, which Tuan adopts, is what he terms narrative-descriptive. Drawing
from and absorbing the first two approaches, Tuan claims he does not pause for
theoretical overviews or excessive analytical detail. Theory, he explains, by
its clarity and weight, drives away countering viewpoints and understandings. “Indeed,”
he claims, “in social science, a theory can be so highly structured that it
seems to exist in its own right, to be almost "solid," and thus able
to cast (paradoxically) a shadow over the phenomena it is intended to
illuminate.”[36]
In a narrative-descriptive approach, however, theories hover ‘supportively’ in
the background while the object of study occupies center stage. It is an
approach Tuan believes is appreciated by scholars predisposed by discipline or
disposition “to appreciate the range and color of life and world,…whose best
works tend to make a reader feel the intellectual pleasure of being exposed to
a broad and variegated range of related facts and of under- standing them a
little better (though still hazily), rather than, as in specialized theoretical
works, the intellectual assurance of being offered a rigorous explanation of a
necessarily narrow and highly abstracted segment of reality.”[37]
Place is far more that a
product of the physical transformation of nature, claims Tuan, it is the ordering
of nature. Chapter two of this work explores how the second wave of
colonization by the United States sought to order geographical place through
survey, land systems and institutions charged with such matters. The initial
ordering of the landscape –“the conversion of undifferentiated space into place”
occurred with the “first ritual act of possession,” by Columbus.[38]
Speaking
for the New World as a whole, Mircea Eliade (1959, 32) asserts that when the Spanish
and Portuguese conquistadores raised the cross over the new territories, they
consecrated them in the name of Jesus Christ and believed that, by doing so,
they en- abled the territories to undergo a "new birth." For through
Christ "old things are passed away; behold, all things are become
new" (Il Corinthians, 5, 17). The newly discovered country was
"recreated" by the cross-reinstated into God's cosmos-as though it
had no prior existence, or that its prior state was one of un- redeemed
wildness. The ritual creation of place was the first step, followed by other
steps, less formal, as explorers pushed inland.[39]
The ‘explorer,’ claims Tuan, through the
processes of naming, surveying, mapping, and the writing up of trip logs and
journals, and field notes, and especially with their subsequent rewriting and
publication,” could “gain access to and take hold on public consciousness and
achieve thereby a higher degree of stability and permanence even though no
physical manipulation of nature had occurred.”[40] In a gesture to ethnography, Tuan notes how ethnographic
report of a non-literate people will invariably include the categorization of
natural objects treated as custom or social knowledge but not as “verbal and gestural
efforts to construct and maintain place-to create a world that resonates to
human needs and desires out of neutral environment.”[41] The
Southwest as a region has a deep history with these narratives of place
modernity. There are particular and recognizable types of architecture,
settlement patterns and cultural life ways. As Chris Wilson demonstrates in The Myth of Santa Fe (1996), this
regional architectural tradition in the case of Santa Fe is more aptly read as
a history of economically, artistically and politically-manifested fiction than
organic fact, but it is a defining imaginary nonetheless. New Mexico has long
stood a romanticized scenographic exemplifier of the Southwest.
Part II: To Arrive Where We Started
We
shall not cease from exploration
And
the end of all our exploring
Will
be to arrive where we started
And
know the place for the first time.[42]
The town of Truth or Consequences offers
a compelling vantage to explore place ideas. I spend the later part of this
work exploring the town in detail, but provide a model for thinking about this
place. The town has witnessed profound changes in the national imaginary
firsthand, from reclamation and wild dreams of a garden Eden in the region at
the turn of the 19th century to the wonders of space flight at the
turn of this last one. The Elephant Butte Dam, completed in 1916, captured the
American imagination in similar ways as the recent construction of Spaceport
America, expected to open to commercial flight any moment now according to
press releases. The modest 1930 and 1940s Works Projects of America Landscapes
and Civilian Conservation Corps landscapes still grace the town and nearby
recreational waters of Elephant Butte Lake State Park. In the 1950s, the town
of Hot Springs witnessed brief national fame when area residents, in a vote of
1230 to 295, voted to change the town’s name to win a contest created by radio
show Truth or Consequences in a publicity bid that heralded the radio show’s
move to television. The 1960 and 1970s saw the influx of ‘countercultures,’
from hippies and new age healers, to
founded strong communities in the area that still thrive. The purported
healing powers of the town’s hot springs are said to have been used for
centuries, as a crossroads and resting place for waves of people and empires in
the region. There is a common narrative that the springs were a peaceful place
where weapons were laid down, a charge that send a good friend of mine who
claims Apache relatives on both sides into gales of laughter.
The town suffered in these last few
decades from economic stagnation, drug problems, a declining population and
other issues. Similar to small towns across the United States, there have also
been periodic surges in preservation, conservation and revitalization efforts.
Its first professed permanent building was a 1880s ranch-hand bathhouse located
somewhere is what is now the Historic Bathhouse District. From this downtown
district you can catch a bus to tour the Spaceport America, or download a
walking map from your smart phone. Locals will give you a friendly warning you
that the cottage industry of methamphetamines makes some places less safe. I
have asked the location of certain places and been walked over four or five
blocks. It is a place, like all places, that is full of contradictions and
complexity.
This is the tension that marks this
work, the continuity of people and place that pushes history forward and the
disruptions in those narratives that mark the shifting contours wrought by new
people and emergent histories remaking place. What drives the imaginaries of
modern places? In what ways do place imaginaries and place making practices
confront and contest ideas about what it means to be modern in theory and in
practice? While these questions are too broad to have any definitive answer,
they form the parameters of this project. How modern place and place making
were imagined and narrated in the quest for reclamation in the southwest is the
focus of this chapter, especially as these ideas relate to progress. This small
town marks the center of my study, but it is a center of a web of larger forces
emanating from near and far. This is as true today as it was a hundred years
ago. Questions of how place and place making in modern New Mexico shaped and
were by these larger forces can be richly explored from the vantage point of
this small town on the banks of the Rio Grande.
[1] Octavio Paz and Elizabeth
Bishop, “Primero de Enero / January First,” Ploughshares 2, no. 4
(January 1, 1975): 14–17, excerpt.
[2] Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits
in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, First Printing
edition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 146.
[5] Ibid, 145.
[6] Edward S. Casey, Getting
Back into Place, Second Edition: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the
Place-World, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2009). "Just as there is no place without a
body," writes Casey, "so there is no body without place. . . . [W]e
are embodied-in-place. . . ." 104.
[7] Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places. The question, “what do people
make of places?” is the opening query in Basso’s preface. This question, I
various incarnations, is the driving force in my dissertation work. Historical
narratives of what people ‘made,’ of the southwest region remain powerful
contemporary dialogue shapers for example. All of my observations and research
can be understood as an iteration of this question. Basso argues that the
question of what people make of places “is as old as people and places themselves,
as old as human attachments to portions of the earth,” (xiii).
[8] Ibid, 105.
[9] Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso,
Senses of Place (Santa Fe, N.M. : Seattle: School of American Research
Press, 1997), 8.
[10] James Howard Kunstler, The Geography
of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1993), 10.
[11] Ibid, 275.
[12] Joel Kotkin, The New
Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape,
1st ed (New York: Random House, 2000), 3.
[13] Levi Romero, A Poetry of
Remembrance: New and Rejected Works (University of New Mexico Press, 2011),
105-106.
[14]
Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga,
The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, 1 edition
(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 459.
[15] Phillip Gonzales, Expressing
New Mexico: Nuevomexicano Creativity, Ritual, and Memory (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2007), 27.
[16] S. Gale and G. Olsson, Philosophy
in Geography, 1 edition (Dordrecht ; Boston: Springer, 1979), 387.
[17] Chris Wilson, Everyday
America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 2.
[18] David Harvey, Justice,
Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996), 261.
[19] Casey, Getting Back into
Place, Second Edition, xxii.
[20] Michael L. Trujillo, Land of
Disenchantment: Latina/o Identities and Transformations in Northern New Mexico,
1 edition (University of New Mexico Press, 2011), iii.
[21] Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places,
iv.
[22] Trujillo, Land of
Disenchantment, v.
[23] Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J.
Katz, Regionalism and the Humanities, First Edition edition (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2009), ix.
[24] Liane Lefaivre, Critical
Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalised World (Munich ; New
York: Prestel Publishing, 2003), 10.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Cheryl Herr, Critical
Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American Midwest
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 14.
[27] Ibid, 16.
[28] Douglas Reichert Powell, Critical
Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture Inthe American Landscape
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 22.
[29] José E. Limón, “Border Literary
Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism,” American Literary
History 20, no. 1–2 (March 20, 2008): 160–82, 167.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Walter D. Mignolo, Local
Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2012),3.
[32] Ibid, 5.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid, 23.
[35] Yi-Fu Tuan, “Language and the
Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach,” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 81, no. 4 (December 1, 1991): 684–96.
[36] Ibid, 685.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid, 689.
[39] Ibid, 687.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,
Edition Unstated edition (New York: Mariner Books, 1968).
