Introduction
This project is about a place called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Halfway between in the 270 mile stretch from sprawling urban centers of Albuquerque, New Mexico and the El Paso, Texas/Juarez, Mexico border cities, this small town with a curious place name is easily bypassed by the Interstate 25. It is known, variously, for its popular culture name-change from Hot Springs to Truth or Consequences in 1950, its national historic register district’s hot mineral baths and bathhouses and mid-19th century downtown vibe, its vibrant arts and healing arts communities or its various other counterculture communities. It is also known for its nearby lake, its reputation as a strange town, its serial killer, its methamphetamine trouble, or, just as likely, it is not known at all. The city has a population of just under 7000 people. The idea that the town is an oddity in the state, or often just plain odd, is ever-present in conversations. A tee-shirt made by a flamboyant local entrepreneur proclaims, “Truth or Consequences, We Are All Here Because We Are Not All There.” The humor does a does a good job illustrating how elusive this town is in the imaginary of New Mexico places. In a state whose storied landscapes are well-studied, Truth or Consequences is something of an enigma.
The claim that the town is slowly gaining national and even global recognition is a well-worn sentiment but surprisingly easy to defend. There is always something going on that speaks to the reach of this place, and it seems there has been since the town’s beginning as a squatter settlement on the low hills above this south central stretch of the Rio Grande. The city of Truth or Consequences offers an unexpected insight into the ways that places have been imagined and enacted in the region from the turn of the 19th century and into the current century. The purpose of this research project is to explore the place narratives and place making practices during this time through the lens of a particular place. I am interested in the ways place narratives and place making lend themselves to the creation of place identities. I consider how ideas about place emerge at the turn of the 19th century, especially as they related to ideas of modernity and progress. I also interested in exploring attachments people have to places, and how these relate to place narrative, place making and place identities. I do not propose to find the universal in the particular case. Rather I hold the particular case, and this is a very particular case, up to scrutiny in order to better see the details in what may be larger patterns.
The town’s incarnations are numerous. From a squatter’s tent town to health sanctuary to game show namesake winner, many residents hope the town will be known as a historic healing center, a new-age health retreat, an affordable spa town, an ecotourism epicenter, a renowned arts community, an off-the-grid sustainability center, a global spaceport destination, or a combinations of these and other hopeful futures. Other residents project not so hopeful futures, ranging from a slow decline into a place for cripples and misfits to a rapid accent as a methamphetamine production center. This research project focuses on a particular place and time using historic and ethnographic methods, but occasionally steps outside of these boundaries. I use both linear and thematic approaches to historical events and narratives. Given the ranging nature of place as a concept, I focus specifically on historical narratives and place making practices that continue to inform present understandings and continue to inform the identities that are claimed and contested. These are the spaces where history and contemporary ethnographic accounts meet, and where the tensions and paradoxes of place are most palpable.
Three goals shape this project. First, the concept of place is given primacy. I am interested in what the city of Truth or Consequences and the history of this small region located in south central can tell me about place as a concept. Place has for so long served as a background to history, and I want to see what happens when place is moved to the foreground. Why do certain ideas about place persist, and how are they created. Do ideas about place, for instance, contribute to ideas about community? Second, I am interested in how a particular place can potentially illuminate larger processes in many places. I do not argue a big picture writ small, but rather a wealth of illuminating details in the particular. The particular case has long served the purposes of scholars seeking more universal or culturally transcendent truth. The goal of amassing a wealth of detail does not serve universal ends in this research project. I do make many gestures to the notion that understanding in one place can illuminate and challenge understandings in others. Finally, I seek to build a different kind of narrative about place, using an experimental method of disruptions in linear histories with thematic and contemporary observations. I envision this hybrid narrative as one where the linear sweep of the historical pasts is disrupted, a strategy I engage to trouble the idea that place is a thing, fixed and geographically known, rather than a fluid phenomenon shaped by mental as much as physical factors.
I am often asked why I chose Truth or Consequences as my historic and ethnographic site. If the person is a fan of the cool/funky/quirky/affordable and laid-back spa town, they think it is a great research project and get very excited as though I am about to split open a geode. Other people ask what I could possibly say in a dissertation about the strange white trash/hippie/serial-murder-guy town or some other demeaning variation on this theme. It is a strong and repeating contrast. The former edges out the latter, unless people have not knowledge of the place. People often tell me that they pass the town on the interstate but never venture past the gas stations, if they stop at all. The odd name is the most prevalent topic of discussion. Most people think it is funny, or even ridiculous. Some think it is silly because it gives no clue to potential visitors that there are mineral springs in the town. If people know the town, they know its popular culture history. The change from Hot Springs to Truth or Consequences was the prize of a national search sponsored by a popular radio quiz show, resulting in the first live coast-to-coast radio broadcast in history. A neighbor, a native resident of Albuquerque for over 60 years, says she always always figured it was just one of those weird little towns that are everywhere, complete with a new Walmart hastening the dying of an old downtown.
T or C is one of my favorite places. As the study of place moves to the center of my research and my theoretical and methodological interest, the town seems more and more intriguing.
I have never been able to tell people about the reasons I love the town in any satisfying way. Part of this research project on some level was an attempt to figure out why the town has such a hold on my own imagination by trying to discern how other people narrative their own place attachments and relationships with place. I find the town compelling, yet also unsettling. There is a palpable strangeness in the town. There are uncomfortable memories, a pushing of old-time religion, constant references to spirituality and consciousness, healing and artiness that I push back against, and something that is a little sinister. I am curious if research that puts place at the center, coupled with a systematic approach to exploring the town yields insights to place attachments.
There are wildly interesting people who live in town. They tell you this themselves. Young and old, although more and more veering to retirees, the population includes the urban refugees, the restless, the artistic and the fiercely different. There are people who come to heal and do yoga in bathhouse hotel courtyards. There are skinny kids with rotten meth teeth and unkempt men with hooded eyes who stare aggressively. There are a lot of homeless, but they stay to the edges of the town, live in ravines behind the Denny’s across from the Walmart. It is town both charming and desolate in turn. It is full of motor court motels and beautifully restored bathhouses, trailers, small rows tiny houses meant for longer stays to convalesce and run-down rows of apartments. Alleys are everywhere. Most alleys, however, run behind tidy house trailers, single family housing and apartments in various stages of remodeling. A few are overgrown and there are several burned out buildings.
There are a handful of trailer parks where people live year-round in tiny travel trailers and old trucks with campers and giant shiny new RV’s. I approach a woman in a new-looking RV for an interview in 2012. She parks her huge RV next to a bathhouse where she also works most days. She has been there seasonally for years, is short and wholesome-looking in her mid-50s. She is very agreeable and kind. The next day I go back and she is gone. She and her husband pull up stakes in the middle of the night. The information the bathhouse owners have about her is, they discover, completely bogus. In these qualities, good and bad, the town is not remarkable, although it is distinctive. What is remarkable is the feeling of constant contradiction.
A couple I interviewed on their arrival and, three months later, as they depart, speak to these contradictions. I catch them the day before they leave. It lures you in this place, you soak and hang out and like everything, says one, until you don’t. Then it’s like waking up and finding yourself in some stranger’s bed and not remembering how you got there. People are crazy here, says the other, which is maybe why we liked it. We loved it, it seemed so cool and funky and laid-back. I think the things people soak out become a cesspool of energy in the downtown, she continues. It’s frightening, her girlfriend finishes. They have friends who own a bathhouse in town, but they never want to come back. I look back at the interview I recorded in my journal at the same eatery. We talk on their second day in town, they sit on a couch. I relax in an armchair. This day they cannot stop talking about the things they like, the people, the art, the soaks, the rocks, the sky, and so on. The interview lasts from eleven to after two. It is their third visit. It does not turn out to be a charm.
The town is visually compelling. Wildly inventive vernacular architecture is everywhere. Incredible physical landscapes surround the town. Tortuga Mountain is the highest peak. Writer Rudolpho Anaya is a patient at the Carrie Tingley Hospital for Crippled Children as a youth and writes a book by the same name. There are wide residential streets, with modest houses varied in style and material, ranging from adobe to candy rock to clapboard. Midcentury business blocks line the downtown main streets, named Main Street and Broadway. The downtown is built on a grade, gradually sloping down from the hills to the river. The fabric is intact with a few large gaps, including a graffiti-marked cement wall once hidden by the old Buckhorn Bar, long-closed but Western-façade photographic. The city tears it down for safety reasons in 2013. A few other 1970s facades remain. Some buildings are remodeled or restored, a handful have a second story. Some are now hot pink, turquoise and purple. The sidewalks are crumbling in many places. It is a cohesive and distinctive enough area to qualify as a National Historic Register district.
There is a commercial strip that roughly parallels the interstate on the north side of town. A Walmart and Holliday Inn, a McDonalds, gas Stations and other ubiquitous chains are the first sighs a visitor sees. If you look east, you can see the dam, in tiny concrete miniature 3 miles away. The elementary, middle and high school are on the eastside of town, as is the bulk of the residential housing. Farther east you can see a suburban neighborhood. Signs to the now-defunct high-end community, with a country club and gold course, and a dozen houses which are not all empty, still stand. This commercial strip lines both sides of the road at the top of a long hill. Older box buildings, restaurants and hotels, a Circle K and bar, 1950, 60s and 70s car court motels continue as you drive down as drive south a mile before the road curves into the historical district branches into the two downtown thoroughfares. People are friendly in a small-town way.
I attend school in Truth or Consequences in the 5th and 8th grades. I live with my grandparents in a small village 20 miles outside of town. My grandmother is born and raised on a homestead in Las Cruces and moves to Monticello at 50 in the 1980s. She says T or C, as it is commonly known, is the largest unfenced and unsupervised mental institution in the state of New Mexico. She says this to get a laugh, but I suspect she means it. She has no fondness for the town. The kids mock me for my city ways and appearances when I arrive, yet these kids are trouble makers on par with any I know in Albuquerque. Trouble-making is the reason my mom ships my back in the 8th grade. Some of the behavior that sends me back starts in the town. I move south because I am restless and unhappy in the 5th grade. My grandmother’s house and farm is a haven. I fall in with a wild set of town kids, as they are known to village kids. I smoke cigarettes and drink in the 5th grade, that plus some during my 8th grade return. Parties always include much older kids. I return to Albuquerque for high School in 1986. Kids tease me about coming from Truth or Consequences. It is small town, but it is also weird, because of the name. So I am a weird small-town girl for a while.
In an interview with a UNM student from Arrey at the UNM bookstore in 2013, I hear a similar version of my own story, except for the kid who tells it is a good village kid. Elementary kids from the outlying rural areas are bussed in for middle school, she says. We are terrified of the kids who live in Truth or Consequences. Terrified, she repeats several times so I am sure to write it down. Kids from t or C, she tells me, are known for their party behavior. There are always a few kids from the Arrey elementary school who end up friends with the bad kids from town she says. They party with guys in their twenties and high school drop outs. Now they do meth, and it’s even scarier, she says in a rush. It’s all we talk about at the end of the year in 5th grade and all summer long. I love the town, she tells me. The mountains are beautiful and the downtown is really cute. I had some great teachers in Middle and High School, and wonderful friends. I will not raise my kid there though, or move back to Arrey, because they would end up there she claims, but maybe Las Cruces to be close to my mom. Albuquerque is too big. Her friends who party young still live in T or C or moved back to Arrey. They never get out she says.
I interview another woman she knows from Arrey who lives in Truth or Consequences. She is a waitress at a chain restaurant connected to a chain hotel, pretty, friendly and very pregnant. We meet at the park so our kids can play. Her story is like mine, except in the 9th grade I go home to Albuquerque. She runs around with the wilder kids, gets in trouble often, and does a lot of drinking and drugs. She is pregnant at the start of High School and drops out. She is married now, with two kids and another on the way. She takes on-line classes at Western New Mexico University, which has a campus on the far-west end of town.
She likes it here, she says, and is glad to raise her kids here, too. Her mom is in Arrey, and her kids get to ride still, get to be on the farm, go to rodeos, and eat often with the extended family. Her daughter loves horses, and they come to the State Fair every year to compete. When I go to Albuquerque I get freaked out driving, she says. My husband has to do it. We go and stay in a hotel and go shopping a few times a year too. It seems like there is a lot more pressure on kids to be something in bigger towns, instead of just themselves. The girls at the mall are all trying so hard to be grown up. But I guess all of us did she says. I’m glad my girl is more grounded. This is a good town. The kids are a little crazy, but kids are crazy everywhere. At least here they have some space to be wild, tear it up across the lake or around the hills. Safer than tearing it up in the city I guess.
My own best friend from High School ends up living in T or C. Now a prominent business woman and supporter of all things local, she loves the town. Her kids are great she tells me, but I see this. They are good boys, polite and friendly. They didn’t do half of the things we did in High School, she says. And at least here I have eyes everywhere. You can always count on people from here, we watch out for one another. She remembers the grief she gave me from being from T or C, laughs that she ended up being from here herself. You don’t have to be born here to come from here she tells me, you just have to be willing to be a part of the town. She and I come down to the lake in High School, to drink and camp and tear it up.
I visit my grandparents, and the town, and, at least monthly throughout high school as well as my college years. I party at the lake, soak and stay with friends in the bathhouses town. I maintain no friendships from my school years. I always come alone or with my own people, to show them a hidden treasure. I also like to come alone for the solitude. I cannot do this anymore today. I cannot get through the parking lot of Bullocks without knowing someone.
Some of my interviewees are so in love with the town they swear they will never leave, yet at least 5 of these newly in-love residents decamp during my two years of field research. None of these features is uncommon individually or as elements of larger global patterns. There is something else that is more elusive however, harder to pin own about the town, that I seek to uncover in my research project. This feature of desire is common to people who have complex place attachments or interests in the complexity of place attachments. I do not think it is just the attachment of the familiar. Kathleen Stewart captures this desire to understand people in place in A Space on the Side of the Road (1996). In places like Red Jacket, Viper, Odd, Amigo, Twilight and Decoy, towns that share the uncommonness of a place name, Stewart uncovers tensions and paradoxes in American narrative of modernization. A cultural poetics of place emerges with vivid power in this text.
Modernity and progress are key ideas in Stewart’s work as well as own. Together they are part of a larger patterns of narratives that embody contradiction, as ruinous in their presence as their supposed absence, as evidenced in linear time but unrecognizable on the ground, or most prominently as always coming . Truth or Consequences is no holler, but it is a squatter settlement. There is a tenacity that comes with making do with little, but there is also the tension that newcomers bring to places, constantly shifting the contours of identity and composition of community ties. Ideas of modernity and progress are still shaping the ways people narrate and imagine history. The kinds of stories about self and place people tell offer critical insight into how places and people are imagined. The more I consider Truth or Consequences as place the stronger my interest grows. The puzzling perception of otherness that adheres to its identity, its population, its reputation, its built and historical insights into the ways that places were being reconfigured and reimagined at the turn of the 19th century all draw me to research.
I start thinking about doing my dissertation research in southern New Mexico in a general way after an experience I have as an intern for the Office of the State Historian (OSH) in 2009. At a lecture presentation by one of the scholars, I ask if southern New Mexico has any similar patterns to the ones being described. The scholar replies, Southern New Mexico has no history. This is met with raucous laughter from many audience members, which includes elected officials. There seem to be a persistent historical vacancy in the south central part of the state. There is emptiness between the Native and Spanish colonial imagination of the north and the southern New Mexico borderlands, which include El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico. I use the term historical vacancy because it suits the patterns and narrative characteristics in this small region. I also think it offers a way to think about places, especially the contradictions of place. There is no place in the American empire where history does not crowd the landscapes. Historical vacancies are a useful means to understand some of the larger patterns of place imaginaries and a part of empire building in the region.
I draw from Walter Mignolo’s use of the word imaginary as “all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving of the world” (Mignolo, 23). A longer conversation on Mignolo’s work is taken up in Chapter 1. These vacancies intrigue me in the same ways that nebulous feeling the town evokes intrigue me. They seem to be closely related. The concept of historical vacancies offers excellent illumination on both historical and contemporary place narratives. The largest individual Spanish Land grant in New Mexico’s Spanish colonial history, to illustrate this point, is the Armendaris Grant. Located in present-day Sierra County, it is now part of Ted Turner’s extensive land holdings in the county. Despite my work at OSH mapping and creating short narrative histories on Land Grants in New Mexico, and my knowledge about the reach, from border to border, of Spanish land grants in New Mexico, I still experience land grants as a feature of the northern New Mexico cultural landscape. Northern New Mexico scholarship can reach as far south as the town of Socorro.
Southern New Mexico and borderland research, in comparison, is also prolific. This area of research extends as far north as the chile and cotton fields of the Rincon Valley. Although the border patrol for many years operates a check point just outside of T or C, and still houses regular operations in this former checkpoint, the imaginary of the borderlands, and the history of the region as a borderland stops short of the town. Yet it is the massive irrigation in the north from Colorado to Albuquerque that triggers the water woes of the south, from New Mexico through El Paso, Texas and into the Mexican City of Juarez. This is turn triggers building Elephant Butte Dam, to settle both an international water problem and to create a modern marvel of technological progress. Reclamation triggers the migration of Mexican nationals, who remain the foundation of agriculture labor in the United States. Yet almost none of this history is present in the town. Historical recovery projects mitigate these vacancies, but their presence motivates my interest.
The National Park Service, the federal agency charged with historic preservation programs, claims that while the Mexican Revolution did not halt work at the Elephant Butte Dam, a cheer did go through the separate tent-camp where Mexican workers lived when word spread of the Pancho Villa raid into Columbus in 1916. These threads that tie this place to the larger histories of the region and nation that stretch across time and often across the globe are still being woven into contemporary narrative. Historical vacancies that mark this region persist. Boosters still push against it in their efforts to publicize the town, often filling the void with historical place myths of every kind.
The central consideration is how places become populated with histories. How, in other words, are historical vacancies filled? The idea of a historical vacancy is especially powerful when set against the histories elided, displaced, buried or ignored. I am fascinated by histories narrated without apparent regard to veracity. Standards of veracity are well-established, even if historical truth is a contentious matter. If there is a historical vacancy imagined in the center of New Mexico it is cultural. The scientific accounts of the region, geological, archeological, hydrological, and so on, line the shelves, much like the earliest surveys of the region, albeit without the celebration of epic adventure that characterizes these narratives. These are foundations of reclamation narratives.
Every story has a place. There are self-published personal narratives, small photocopied books held by staples about the region that I turn to in Chapters 3 and 4. Every place has its stories. Many of the stories I record in T or C lean heavily on the side of conjecture or, as often, indifference to veracity if the story or history is interesting. Oral history relies on the unstable foundation of memory. Oral traditions, however, rely on training, mastery and skill. I do not argue that the town or region are not strongly imagined and clearly articulated in many sources, from interviews to published recollections, to historical documents to the movie, Welcome to Truth or Consequences, which is currently being edited by a Belgian film crew who were in town recording in 2013. I do think that the town, and the idea of historical vacancies, has a lot to contribute to the growing interest in the study of place and body of research about place.
The imminent demise of places, or the end-of-place narratives, exists in many places, including the town. These narratives extend from destructions of local landmarks to the viability our global ecosystems. The iniquitousness of commercial strips is decried; urban sprawl and big box stores are vilified. The opening of Walmart in 2008 hastens some downtown store closures, but other businesses prosper in the historic downtown. The idea of the end of mineral water is a popular narrative. Although a study done in 2014 results in the City Council’s repeal on a drilling moratorium, there is dogged unease about the water’s quality and character. These narratives speak to a fissure of sorts, emptiness in the fabric of place. This is similar to the idea of historical vacancies. They are both barren narratives.
The town provides a setting to explore the some of the questions that drive the growing field of place studies, from shifting theories on place, the creation of place narratives, to ideas of place making, to growing concerns with preservation, branding, sustainability and development. The town illumines the continuity, dislocation, ancient methods, modern marvels and the ordinary wonders and tragedies of place and the ways places are made, unmade and persist. I argue that this particular place offers examples of how historical and contemporary place narratives and place making practices relate to place identities, and how these identities in turn relate to local, regional, national and global processes.
The area is a crossroads for waves of people and empires in the region, a witness to national and world history writ small, yet is also obscure, a peripheral place that is easily overlooked. Place, in this research narrative, emerges as an ephemeral and temporary phenomenon rather than fixed and therefore knowable thing. Elephant Butte Dam, three miles northwest of the town, is completed the same year the town incorporates in 1916. The largest dam in the world outside of Egypt when it was completed, the Dam was idealized as a modern marvel and testament to man’s control of the landscape. The narratives of western reclamation, elaborate dreams of a Southwest garden Eden at the turn of the 19th century and large-scale settlement shifted rapidly to idea about the technological and scientific control of the landscape. These narratives are global in scope, nationally governed, regionally championed and locally manifest in concrete dams across the region.
The turn of this last century finds the newest modern marvel celebrated in space flight at Spaceport America. The proximity of the Spaceport is similar to the dam—close enough to tantalize the town, but far removed politically and economically. The Dam, however, at three miles, brings people in seeking services, and in many ways wholly creates the town’s service industries and begets its initial population boom. Many different narratives emerged with reclamation, but all were publicly-minded and funded, even if wealth was created for fewer than promised. The Spaceport, at 30 miles, employees a handful of people in the town and recently partnered with a local bathhouse motel belonging to Ted Turner to house guests, but ties are tenuous.
The town is a curiosity in most articles, given both its name as well as its spectacular geographical landscapes, mid-century downtown blocks, artfully restored bathhouses, and shifting populations of remarkably interesting individuals. The Spaceport is a private enterprise, despite its public funding in two New Mexico counties. It is a marvel of science that serves the extremely wealthy. There are similarities to massive public works built at the last turn of the century and the building of the Spaceport. It is the turn to the future, and the promise of that future, that excites people in ways infrastructure has ceased to. It is in the differences, however, and the perception of the differences by town’s residents, that the massive shift in expectations comes to light.
There are no Spanish or Mexican colonial settlement patterns that mark many New Mexico places and make them distinctive. There is an ongoing and earnest conversation about creating a “historic plaza” in the center of downtown. The idea that “historic” places can be created illustrates a powerful idea. Historic replication often entails designs based on stereotypes and imaginary pasts, exaggerated historical tropes, and similar attempts to reproduce certain types of places in retail, recreation and other place making taxonomies. This gesture to using particular historic types is still evident in a handful of the 1970s western facades that remain affixed to downtown buildings.
A new proposal is in the works however, to create a conservation and ecologically-themed park. This site of eco-consciousness, according to a local healer in town, rather than an artificial park, will be a catalyst for a sea change in the town. The site sits catty-corner to the historic bathhouse hotel Turner recently purchased, and there is some hope that the Turner Foundation might fund the project. How and why particular types, such as western facades, idealized mid century downtown Main Streets business blocks or even conservation preserves emerge from ideas about what places were, are or should be, among others, are part of this research.
The town is a “new” place in the New Mexican landscape, only 100 years old in 2016. Regional irrigation is arguably the primary reason for the town’s existence, but the only ditch in town can be seen in the remaining visible sections of the hot mineral water ditch that runs through the downtown, fed by bathhouse runoff since the 1920s. There are no fields or farms in town or the outlying area irrigated by the massive storage waters of Elephant Butte Dam. The Dam’s reclaimed water, although touted as a means to provide water to small farms and prospective homesteads are primarily utilized to provide regular and consistent water flow to well-established agricultural lands of the Rincon Valley and Mesilla Valley. The town does get a lake nearby. The rise of outdoor leisure and recreation as a national narrative is embraced in the decades before and after WWII and continue to contribute to the town’s financial health. Recent drought and historically low water levels have re-focused attention on reclamation and irrigation water, especially as they relate to environmental concerns.
The water that grows the town, however, does not come from the Rio Grande. It comes from aquifers thousands of feet underground. These hot mineral waters draw the first townspeople to the area, illegally erecting homes and businesses on reclamation reservation lands in the early 1900s.
The much older Native American settlement and control of the region by Apache groups provides similar contrasts to both the north of New Mexico as well as Apache histories in the South of New Mexico. The Warm Springs band of Apache, also known as the Chihende, or Red Paint People, were largely nomadic people, like the many Apache tribes who roamed and controlled a region encompassing a southern New Mexico through Arizona. Apache patterns of settlement as well as their oral traditions mean less knowledge and fewer histories of regional places generally recorded by Spanish who come into the settled Rio Grande Valley in the 1600s.
There is also less awareness and commercial exploitation of Native American history in the region compared to other places in New Mexico, although there certainly are strong examples in town. A recent publication of decades-long archeological and historical research on the Apaches in the area will likely change the landscape of both place narratives and place identities in the town and region. The springs the Chihende group claims as part of their ancestral homeland and as a sacred site were the waters of Ojo Caliente in Cañada Alamosa. The entrance to the canyon is twenty miles to the northwest of the town, and the spring, several miles further back in the canyon, is not easily accessed.
Apache control of the territory is well-established. Apache use knowledge of the land, resources and landscape to evade colonial defeat for centuries. The presence of Apaches and the impassible marsh that surrounded the current town site kept the Spanish to travel the Jornada del Muetro, the treacherously dry climb through the desert plains to the east of the Rio Grande. These conditions keep the Spanish, as well as Americans, from lingering in the area which is now Truth or Consequences. The modern narrative that hot springs, prior to colonial contact, are peaceful places is neutral places is common to hot spring histories in every part of the United States. This is a treasured narrative, despite the lack of historical grounding.
Deep grinding holes in the rock outcroppings by the river offer irrefutable evidence that Native groups have used the area, and probably the springs, for many centuries. Sustained settlement is not possible until the region’s Apache are taken as American prisoners of war to camps in Oklahoma and Florida in 1861. There are difference between oral histories as a historical or anthropological method and oral history as a means by which cultures transmit place narratives, histories, and other identities. I propose a connection between these cultural transmissions and the historical vacancies that mark the area.
Small Hispanic settlements dot the agricultural land along the Rio Grande in the mid-to- late1800s and into the canyons where water flows from springs and creeks. Some of these close to the river flood when the dam is built. Some of these towns remain. A few have gentrified and have become small place destinations. Some early miner’s camps are also established during this time, and are abandoned as the mining industry dies out in the region. The first American settlers in the region are these miners who came in the mid-1800s. They are the first settlement population. They join the many soldiers who man the forts and Civil War camps that stretch the length of the state along the Rio Grande corridor and who fight the Apache Wars. Cowboys come to the area to work for the large ranch holdings in the county at the turn of the 19th century. When mining began to lose hold, a new industry takes over.
The building of Elephant Butte Dam brings the first small population boom to the area. It almost instantaneously creates a town of 3000 workers, both single men and their families. It is the influx of dam workers to the region that sparked the first wave of settlers a few miles downstream. Although legally deemed squatters on reservation land not open to homesteading or claim, these first residents set up tents for living and businesses on the hillsides above the marshy and flood-prone river bottom. In addition to offering hot mineral soaks and mineral water for health seekers, the town offers diversions forbidden to dam workers in their own town, like spirits, gambling and prostitution. The handful of bathhouse tents and modest buildings scattered across the hillsides, stand in stark contrast to the carefully laid out town sites built for construction workers at the nearby dam site. The town incorporates and became a legal entity in 1916 after a long battle to open lands to legal title, the same year that the Elephant Butte Dam is completed.
The railroad, built miles east of town, follows the route the Spanish used, across the high dry plains of the Jornada. One spur from Engle, long abandoned, is built to carry material from the dam. But there is no railroad boom or bust. The rectangular regularity that defines great swaths of western towns built along the railroad is still present in the town however. It is slightly off-centered, and meanders some, but evidences how adopted patterns and place expectations continuously manifest themselves in the landscape. A few modest 1930s and 1940s Works Projects Administration buildings remain iconic examples of New Mexico architectural styles, and serve as examples of national projects aimed to not only put Americans to work, but to build pride in regional and national identities.
The WPA-built Carrie Tingley Hospital for Crippled Children, now the NM Veteran’s Center, a venerable territorial-style institution that sits above the town, is a fine example of the grandeur at a small-town scale. Extensive Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) rockwork, trails and other recreation amenities at the Elephant Butte Dam Recreation Area exemplify national place making practices that embody a wide range of narrative about people, place and identity. They mark the rise of leisure and automobile landscapes, and, as they abruptly end, the start of WWII. Car court motels and one-room apartments in the downtown area still stand as a testament to the often over-looked history of the many ways that health-seekers pushed western migration at the turn of the 19th Century until WWII. The impulse to holistic and self-healing remains a character-defining feature of the town today, and experiences a sustained resurgence in the last decade, although the “countercultures” the town is also known for has much more variety.
In the 1950s, the town of Hot Springs embraces a period of national fame when area residents, in a vote of 1230 to 295, changed the town’s name to win a contest by wildly-popular radio show host Ralph Edwards. His radio show, Truth or Consequences, is about to move to television. The first ever live coast-to-coast broadcast of the radio show is held in the Hot Springs High School gymnasium. The 1960 and 1970s sees the influx of a growing number of ‘countercultures,’ from hippies and new-age believers who join the established communities of healers, farmers, ranchers, artists and others in the area, a pattern that continues unabated.
The town’s fortunes suffer in the 1980s and 1990s. Issues include economic stagnation, methamphetamine-fueled drug problems, the periodic corruption scandals of public officials, a declining and aging population, a shrinking nearby Elephant Butte Lake due to drought and irrigation demands, as well as other place maladies. A serial murder in the nearby town of Caballo is strongly linked to the town news accounts by virtue of proximity and the draw of the town’s name. Many of the tragedies of violence that mark places are known here, especially sexual violence. The idea that violence marks the town more than others is a common theme in interviews, and carries traces of narratives about the region that were well-established at the turn of the 19th century.
It is a rural county by census definition, where ‘going to town,’ often means a longish car trip and a visit to Sonic or Walmart. The historic bathhouse district downtown draws tourists to its healing waters and arts community, as well as local residents who moved to the town for the hot mineral waters. The Sentinal, one of the town’s two weekly paper, claims that the ecotourism on Ted Turner’s huge ranches, and his conservation efforts to these ends, will be the future of the town. The Spaceport has engendered the same fervor that the reclamation movements did at the turn of the last century. Other populations include retirees who come for the cheap cost of living and the sunshine, many at nearby Elephant Butte Lake. A handful of ranchers and farmers still make a living in the county, and a few businesses do very well, and although many small businesses are not thriving or do not last long. Government money, in jobs, grants, and infrastructure, maintains the town.
Similar to small towns across the United States, there have also been periodic surges in preservation, conservation and revitalization efforts, and hopeful signs of resurgence, community health and resiliency. A new book on urban homesteading in the town has received national attention and was glowingly reviewed in the LA Times Review of Books. Bathhouse restoration is ongoing and steady. It is still a place where more people seem to pass through than stay, according to longer-term town residents. Remnants of mining towns and ghost towns draw specific tourists to the area. A handful of younger couples, wanderers and urban homesteaders, former urban dwellers, have made a go of small-town living. The healing arts and traditional arts communities and the people who move to the community for these reasons, or for a variety of other reasons, round out the newest wave of settlers, some stretching back decades of residence. The local Walmart does a brisk business.
Truth or Consequences is a place that is riotously unique even as it shares patterns and characteristics of small towns across the world. It is a place, like all places, that is full of contradictions and complexity. Many of the issues I grapple with in my research are tied, I ultimately argue, to the idea that place is a fixed and knowable thing. Place must become unmoored from this idea or we risk becoming unmoored from place. Philosopher Casey Stevens reminds us that we are embodied beings, and as such we are nothing without place (Casey 2009, 104). I take up these histories and narratives in the following chapters.
Chapter One begins with a discussion on place, as well as the theory and methods I use to explore place. Chapter Two looks at reclamation narratives and the histories that drove massive reclamation project in the region. I look at the ways that the region is narrated, surveyed and imagined as plans for reclamation in the region 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. 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 settlement and even 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. Chapter four explores tourism, poverty, dislocation, violence, corruption, preservation and revitalization, community-building and the everyday celebration and contests in the town moves into the business of space travel and forging new place identities.
Woven into the narratives of this entire research project, including this introduction, are observations and interview narratives from the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the town of Truth or Consequences and surrounding area, as well as images. This project concludes with considerations on how place ethnography might be used to approach the study of place. This is a hybrid mixed-method I define as an interdisciplinary engagement with ethnography, history, cultural landscape studies, critical theory or other methods people might want to bring to the study of place.
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