chapter 1: (place) take four...action

Chapter 1: Inventing the Reality of the World

In his poem “January First,” Octavio Paz deftly captures how place narratives and place making are approached and theorized in this study. The poem is an exchange between two people at the start of the New Year. Paz writes, “The year’s doors open like those of language.” The next day the pair will have to “think up signs” and “sketch a landscape,” in order, writes Paz, “to invent once more the reality of this world” (Paz and Bishop 1975, 15). In just a few verses, Paz speaks to the idea that place is a fluid phenomenon, shifting daily and constantly being remade by its inhabitants. He does this without theoretical bulk or the dense discourse about language that mark place’s critical scholarship. I am not so fortunate in my choice of medium. This chapter is an exploration of the theories and concepts of that populated the landscape of this research project. I discuss these ideas in many different ways. In some cases I tie these theories directly to my research site, or particular histories I explore in this project. I will also discuss ideas and defer their grounding to a later chapter. I bring in certain ideas in order to develop my own concepts. There are instances where I will briefly I touch particular works because they illuminate important ideas about place. Place is the most powerful way we create the reality of the world, and this idea is where I begin.  

I take my working definition of place from geographer Edward Relph (1976), who writes that places “are fusions of human and natural order and are the significant centers of our immediate experiences of the world” (141). Relph draws from anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) and his elaboration on ethnography as thick description. “What the ethnographer is in fact faced with —except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection— is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render” (10). Thick description is observation made clear with interpretation. Geertz argues that “that culture consists of webs of significance woven by human beings, in which we are all suspended,” (5). Extending this claim, Relph writes that “places occur where these webs touch the earth and connect people to the world” (Relph 1996, 24). This elaboration captures the fluid complexity I claim throughout this project. I am interested in the dynamic and constantly shifting configuration of forces that describes the location where our webs of significance touch the ground. Place is both an external as well as an internal experience, contingent on experience, not just in the physical realm, but in the cognitive world as well. Geographer Peter Jackson (1989, 1993) argues that place is in where we chose to look and where those images are processed and thus is ultimately a mental construct, albeit one realized on the ground.

American geographer Carl Sauer first popularized the idea that geographical place combines both topographical elements and human action in his work on cultural landscapes. Sauer pens the classical definition of cultural landscapes in The Morphology of Landscape (1925) as being “fashioned out of a natural landscape by a cultural group,” where “culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, and the cultural landscape is the result” (298). Beginning in the early 1970s, a body of scholarship emerged that established and refined understandings about relationships between place, culture, and perception, including works by scholars such as J. B. Jackson (1970, 1980, 1986), Edward Relph (1976, 1985), Anne Buttimer (1976), Buttimer & Seamon (1980), Yi-Fu Tuan (1974, 1977, 1980,), David Lowenthal (1976), Edward Soja (1989) and David Harvey (1969, 1972, 1985, 1989). American geographer Donald W. Meinig argued, capturing the spirit of this first wave of place scholarship,  that “landscape is composed not only by what lies before our eyes, but also what lies in our heads” (1986, 2:34).

The second wave of place-centered scholarship emerged in the 1990s. Irwin Altman and Setha Low’s Place Attachment (1992) is a seminal work on the role of place in anthropological and geological study. Postmodern, poststructuralist, and critical theory scholarship on place emerged as well, especially in the work of anthropologist and geographer David Harvey (1996, 2000, 2006), “urbanist” Edward Soja (1996, 2000), political geographer John Agnew (1997, 2002, 1987), and geographer Doreen Massey (1994, 2005). Definitions of place that emerge in these works are as varied and nuanced as those that first emerge, which has always been a hallmark in the study of place. Massey defines place as “layers of articulation” (1994, 188). “Addressed by all of the social and cultural academic fields,” says Phillip B. Gonzales in his introduction to Expressing New Mexico: Nuevomexicano Creativity, Ritual and Memory (2007), “the concept of place has come to signify the special qualities of any bounded and identifiable human habitat, including imagined ones” (27). Philosopher Edward Casey (1992, 1996, 1997, 2000) canonical philosophical texts on the subject hold place as paramount in understanding society, history, and human experience. Common usages of place are varied, ranging, and contestable (Agnew 1987, 1993; Creswell 2000, 2004; Seaman 2000).

Relph’s (1976) early and influential work on the phenomenological experience of place identifies three basic place components: physical setting, activities, and meanings. Meaning, Relph claims, is the most difficult to grasp. John Agnew (1987) describes place as having three dominant characteristics. The first is locale, the formal or informal settings in which social relations are constituted. The second is location, the physical setting where social interaction, encompassing economic, cultural, and political processes, takes place. The third is sense of place, the local “structure of feeling” (28). Environmental psychologist Fritz Steele argues in Sense of Place (1981) that people’s relations to places arise in a dialectic involving place qualities and the characteristics of people when they are in place. Relph (2008) claims place is “not a bit of space, nor another word for landscape or environment, it is not a figment of individual experience, nor a social construct,” but is, “instead, the foundation of being both human and non-human; experience, actions, and life itself begin and end with place” (36). Edward Casey (2002) stresses the primacy of place to “accord to [itself] a position of renewed respect by specifying its power to direct and stabilize us, to memorialize and identify us, to tell us who we are and what we are” (xv). This is only possible, he claims, through an awareness of “where we are (as well as where we are not),” and so “to be in the world is to be in place.” Casey writes that the phenomenal particularization and abstractness of Heidegger’s formal and abstract “being-in-the-word,” can only be mitigated by the “concreteness of being-in-place, i.e., being in the place-world itself” (xv). Phenomenological study holds place to be neither fully objective nor fully subjective, but rather a lived experience. Geographer Yi Fu Tuan (1979) 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” (388). Nicholas Entrikin in The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (1991) claims that to ignore this fluid duality of self and nature, of perception and reality, and the tension between the subjective and objective nature of knowing, “is to misunderstand the modern experience of place” (134). Feminist art critic Lucy Lippard begins The Lure of the Local (1997) by claiming that for her, place “is the locus of desire” (4).

Place identity is the the focus of this research project. Relph (1976) writes that place identity is the “persistent sameness and unity,” which allows place to be “differentiated from others,” (45). He develops these ideas in concert with dwelling and identity, and especially the idea of home. Place identity, however, is most often defined as an individual sense of identification with places. Place identity is used to describe the ways that place and identities are linked, especially in terms of attachment. This is most often cast as an emotional connection, a bond of kinship, interest, experience or affinity (Relph 1976; Seamon 1979; Rowles 1983). The question of when place attachment attains the strength to become part of personal identity has been explored mostly through survey and quantitative analysis, but there is a strong body of theoretical work as well (Altman & Low, 1992; Gifford, 2002, Giuliani 2003). Geographer Anssi Paais (2003) begins his considerations on regions and identity by noting that “identity, a term that was not yet included in Williams’ important Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (1976), has become a major watchword since the 1980s” (475). Seamon (2012) claims “place identity refers to how people living in a place take up that place, their world; how they unself-consciously and self-consciously accept and recognize that place as part of their personal and communal identity” (13). Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1993) states that, “identity is formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture” (135).

The difference between individual identity and collective identity remains theoretically and conceptually underdeveloped. In later works, Relph (2009) distinguishes between genius loci, what he calls the spirit of place, and the sense of place. He defines the spirit of place as the singular qualities of a particular landscape or environment that give it a unique ambience and character. Sense of place, the much more common term, is the individual perceptions of a particular landscape. This is the experience and perception of a spirit of place. “Some people are not much interested in the world around them, and place” he writes, “is mostly a lived background” But others “always attend closely to the character of the places they encounter” (25). I use place identity in Relph’s sense of spirit of place. Place identity is the collective identity of a place, the idea of it, and the sense of a place. It is what people think of when they think of a place. It is the character and image of a place. This is the source of much debate but less theoretical development. There are generally a few very strong identities markers that characterize a place. Melded to perception, these characterizations found place identity. 

I use the concept of place imaginary throughout this project. It is a concept I devised to bridge the fluid and shifting but still-grounded concept of place, and the ephemeral but persistent ideas and experiences that shape place perceptions. I draw from semiotician Walter Mignolo (2000). Mignolo sketches a history of modernity that precedes the Enlightenment but also creates the conditions for the seemingly global triumph of Enlightenment ideas. This begins, he argues, with the onset of Spanish colonialism and the “building of the Atlantic imaginary.” An “imaginary” he writes, is “all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving of the world” (Mignolo, 2000, 23). Mignolo argues that the modern/colonial world-system can be described in conjunction with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit and the conquest of the Americas. This is the “imaginary of the modern/colonial world.” I also use literary theoretician Edward Said’s work on imaginative geographies Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1994). Said argues that Western society has imagined the world through a range of disparate and encompassing practices and process in order to justify and advance its colonial ambitions and practices. Said claims  “that none us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from struggle over geography, that struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginary” (1994, 7). Said’s imaginative geography is a concept that describes the ways colonial discourses reinvent landscape by imbuing them with meanings that justify territorial control and subjection. David Harvey (1970) uses the term geographical imagination as part of a “spatial consciousness,” of the work of culture and capital (Harvey, 48). These form, in the language of this research project, the place imaginaries of a town or city or state, a nation, or even a globe.  Geographer Denis Cosgrove (1984, 2001) contends that landscapes are texts that are also deeply influenced by perception in their interpretation. They are unquestionably material, Cosgrove claims, yet emerge into being as readable text with cultural forces at work, only in the gaze of an observer. Like Cosgrove, Said argues that landscapes are a material realities but our perception of them is fundamentally invented and imagined.

The concept of narrative is also used extensively in this project. Narrative encompasses both the telling and the tale. What we say about place not only creates the conditions for tangible features of place, but how we imagine places. Place narratives are defined as the ways places are described, documented, and understood. Geographical place narratives, for example, include the political, scientific or intellectual work of recording, surveying, and mapping patterns in the landscape such as geological features, terrain, resources, settlement, infrastructure, the built environment, and other physical and material characteristics. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, in an elegant and cogent article titled Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach (1991) asserts 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 objects and places visible and to give them character, says Tuan. This trait is readily apparent in the fashioning of the American Southwest. Tuan outlines three approaches to speech and place. The first begins with the nature of language itself, and the second requires a focus on the use and effectiveness of speech and social contexts. Tuan adopts a third approach. It is what he terms a “narrative-descriptive” approach to the study of place (686). 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” (685). 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 understanding 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” (688).

Tuan, echoing Mignolo and Said, describes how the modern imaginary of place begins the Spaniards arrival in the New World, an imaginary that precedes, preconfigures and casts aspirations on future geographical claims. Tuan writes that place, in the standard literature, is a product of the physical transformation of nature in this New World, occurring with the first European ax. This understanding misses a critical component of how place was imagined, he argues. The “the ordering of nature-the conversion of undifferentiated space into place-occurred much earlier…with the first ritual act of possession,” by the Spanish he writes. The newly discovered country was “recreated” by the cross, he continues, “reinstated into God's cosmos-as though it had no prior existence, or that its prior state was one of unredeemed wildness” (687). The ritual creation of place was the first step, Tuan claims, followed by other others as explorers pushed inland.

Tuan’s arguments, despite their elegance, do not encourage me to leave theory hovering supportively in the background as I seek to understand the object of my study. I struggle with these questions actively in the field and in my public research blog. The considerable theoretical debate and development on these ideas gives me a way to think about how they emerge into the landscape I study. In an essay titled The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory (1984), Hayden White, a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, laid out some of the foundations he developed richly in Content of the Form (1987). White suggests that “value attached to narrative in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (White 1987, 25). While this research project seeks to challenge idea about histories through contemplation on place and a study of a particular place, it is not a project devoted to questions of history. Yet I do devote considerable time to these questions. An introduction to these ideas provides this project’s theoretical groundwork in the approach to considerations of history. At issue are scholars who would see hsitory striving to be a science, and in this desire, discounting narrative. “Within professional historical studies,” White writes, “the narrative has been viewed for the most part neither as a product of a theory nor as the basis for a method, but rather as a form of discourse which may or may not be used for the representation of historical events,” (White 1984, 1). What what “distinguishes ‘historical’ from ‘fictional’ stories is first and foremost their contents, rather than their form.” The content of historical stories was real events, “events that really happened,” rather than imaginary events, events that were “invented by the narrator” (2). White explores four broad discussions of narrative and the role of narrative in historical theory that defined academic debates in the latter half of twentieth century in the West. How are narrative representations of reality, especially those represented as the past, arbitrated against these debates? Subtly, densely, with great theoretical nuance and at great length, judging by White’s careful consideration in this mere 33 page article. Even as I struggle to extricate my own writing from this structure of inscrutable incomprehensibility to all but the most well-versed, I am drawn to it the explanatory power of critical theory across disciplines. I defer to Whites’ question in his concluding remarks: “How else can any ‘past,’ which is by definition comprised of events,  processes, structures, and so forth that are considered to be no longer perceivable, be represented in either consciousness or discourse except in an “imaginary” way?” To which his concludes, “Is it not possible that the question of narrative in any discussion of historical theory is always finally about the function of imagination in the production of a specifically human truth?” (33).

This idea can be extended to the study of place. Place is narrated into being, in other words, but the conditions are given, even as the conditions are themselves narrated into being. Edward Said (1993) contends that “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” (Said, xii). This is not a project of merely projecting a meaning onto a landscape, but it is an active colonial subject creation, even at the present moment. Said argues that imaginative geographies play a role in identity formation and sense of place through these material and cultural markers of belonging. White’s arguments illuminate these ideas as well, that “our desire for the imaginary, the possible, must contest with the imperatives of the real, the actual,” and in these “conflicting claims where the imaginary and the real are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a discourse,” that “we begin to comprehend both the appeal of narrative and the grounds for refusing it” (White 1984, 4). White’s critics defend the work of historians and the histories they build as seeking rigor through collectively developed framework which are dependent on hard archival research. Historian seeks to establish and assembles convincing evidence.

The place identity of Truth or Consequences is typified by a phenomenon that I call a historical vacancy, a condition that is constantly at work in any assessment of place meaning and place making narrative about the town and the region. The term historical vacancy describes a place characterized by the perception of an unoccupied past or emptiness in the historical narrative of a place, as well as the ways history is created and projected onto places. It is a concept, like place imaginaries, I create in order to consider the particular ways history, narrative and place come together in my research project. I use the term historical vacancy because it suits the patterns and narrative characteristics of the histories that emerge into places that are perceived as unsettled. There is no place in the American empire where history does not crowd the landscape. This particular part of the New Mexico landscape, however, does not carry the same evidence of empire as other parts of the state. Histories narrated without apparent regard to veracity are a defining feature of the town. Many of the stories I record in this work lean heavily on the side of conjecture or, just as often, indifference to veracity if the story or history is interesting. Historical vacancies are also a useful way of understanding where patterns of place imaginaries shift, where histories are elided, displaced, buried, or ignored.

Similar to the interdisciplinary nature of place scholarship in recent decades, the stitching together different threads of theory and method, as evidenced in this project, is the revival of place-based movements. Architect and historian Delores Hayden (1997) talks about the power of place in her book of the same name. The power of place is generally cast as a positive expression that melds sense of place, place making, politics, preservation, public history and a host of other place-specific activities. Place commemorations and celebrations are mainstays 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 tourists’ capes with supposedly authentic cultural expressions. Other histories—of settlement, violence, empire, kinship, and community— recede in many of these efforts 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. Hayden claims these considerations are integral to the creation of inclusive, honest and meaningful places.

Anthropologist Keith Basso’s call to make haste in the study of places in Wisdom Sits in Places (1996) fueled some of my initial desire to locate and explore the connections between people and places. Basso claimed that place attachments were profound and critical to our individual and community well-being and identity. This resonated with my research interests. Basso’s final chapter of Wisdom Sits in Places began with a relentlessly haunting list of the anguish confronting places and communities, efforts to protect places, stay on ancestral lands or to preserve sacred places, issues of environmental destruction, poverty, despair and massive inequality. He followed this litany with remarks on people’s adeptness at creating richly lived and sensed places. Basso claimed that many of these deep attachments to places were represented, enacted, and embodied in physical landscapes. The question, “What do people make of places?” was the opening query in Basso’s preface. Historical narratives of what people “made” of the Southwest remain powerful contemporary dialogue shapers. Basso argued that the question of what people make of places was “as old as people and places themselves, as old as human attachments to portions of the earth” (xiii). According to Basso the task of ethnographers is to fashion a written account that adequately conveys his or her understanding of other people’s understandings. It is a discomforting business abounding with loose ends, he claims. He argues that with patience, good humor as well as perseverance, it is possible to achieve the ethnographer’s task of determining what expressive acts might mean, and relating them to larger ideas. Fashioning accounts that convey the ethnographer’s understanding of others' understandings is a daunting task, but a worthy one, says Basso. He writes that 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” (1976, 34). 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” (35) that are worthy of wider attention, attention that places, and the ways they are understood, deserve. In Senses of Place (1997), Basso’s and anthropologist Steven Feld claim that place ethnographies seek to “locate the intricate strengths and fragilities that connect places to social imagination and practice, to memory and desire, to dwelling and movement” (8).

I mirror parts of this research project against the experimental ethnographic essays of Michael Trujillo in 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 city of Española is another intellectual pillar of this project’s theoretical and methodological approach. Uncomfortably opposed at many junctures, these two texts taken together nonetheless create a framework for my own research. Basso’s work is hailed as “a classic creative ethnographic representation” on the book’s back cover. Trujillo, on the other hand, claimed his goal in Land of Disenchantment was “to challenge ethnography” (209). He employed what he described as the once-radical style of the modernist ethnography. Representations of supposedly cohesive cultural groups have long been a mainstay of ethnography. This is decidedly true in New Mexico. Not merely portrayed as cohesive, but outside of the modern, First Nation and Nuevo Mexicana/o communities have a long history with the ethnographic gaze according to Trujillo. Trujillo engaged the modernist ethnography through a series of essays, “a form designed to address such complex and often-indefinable subjects” (23). This form, he claimed, captured the dynamic intertextuality between the ethnographic gaze and the ethnographic archive. It is a method “aware of the historical and contemporary connections that link the objects of its gaze” 924). Trujillo explored the juxtaposition between the positive and negative, a cascading “dialectical where “a thing is affirmed as what it is through a denial of what that thing is not” (21).To “evoke negativity is a political intervention and performs a political act and destabilizes illusions of perfection, presence and permanence,” in “such places, the positive and negative, form and excess, reasons and its other are imbricated” (20).

The identity that emerges is a “complex and dynamic unity, a differentiated, meditated phenomenon contingent on negativity” (21). Trujillo used his framework to interrogate his own ethnographic accounts. Trujillo, like Basso, spoke to finding something sublime and fulfilling in ethnography. 

Trujillo noted that modernist ethnography was well-suited to a time when “paradigms are in disarray, problems intractable and phenomena are only partly understood” (24). Trujillo maintained that through this method the ethnographer admitted the challenge of bewilderment and incomprehension that accompanied observation as well as the constant presence of past representations of cultural groups that loom in any present ethnographic account. Unlike Basso, Trujillo eschewed the “desire to unmask or defrock some larger or deeper truth,” an approach common to many ethnographic representations. Yet Trujillo conceded that even as he strives to recognize the complex, partial, and subjective representations his ethnographic accounts, he still sought “to paint a picture that is somehow more whole than previous ethnographies” (26).

I too engage an experimental ethnographic method to explore this dynamic intertextuality and tension in a particular place. This has resulted in a mixed-method work: part ethnographic study of the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, part historical inquiry into what people make of places in the larger Southwest United States, beginning at roughly the turn of the 19^th century, part philosophical musing on place and identity. I call this method place ethnography, and describe it at length in my next chapter. I am both an outsider and and insider in the town, belonging in measure but still distant. My focus on place and place identity as well as my professional focus on historic preservation created an uncanny urge to boosterism and a hesitation to delve into the realities of poverty, drug abuse, alcohol use and exclusion that marked the town. Familiarity is tricky, as is the tension between local, state, regional, national and global frames. The modern is especially tricky in all of its incarnations, especially the tendency in the modern to cast the world into binaries. I borrow the work tricky from David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000), who “looks at the tricky question of the relation between ‘particularity’ and ‘universality’ in the construction of knowledge” (15).  Harvey follows his remarks on the “tricky question,” with a robust denial of the choice between the particular and the universal. “Within a relational dialectics,” he claims, “one is always internalized and implicated in the other” (16). This is one tenant of his approach to a “historical-geographical materialism,” that takes as central in its study of place a sustained tension between the geographical global forces of capitalism, the bodies embedded in these global networks, and the practices of contest and conciliation in expressions of culture, activism and creativity that marks place.

A similar method is adopted by James Clifford in The Predicament of Culture (1988), in his claim that his research “migrates between the local and the global perspectives, constantly re-contextualizing its topic.”  Broadly conceived as a critical ethnography of the West, Clifford seeks to rupture the hegemonic discourses of that have shaped the study of culture. Clifford claims that nostalgia for some unbroken and authentic past, in the face of the dislocations of modernity, are themes that have shaped the way Western trained scholars see, study and evaluate the world. The questions Clifford asks are familiar in critical theory, including ideas on who has the authority to speak for cultural identities, ideas on how essential elements and boundaries of culture established, and considerations of the role of ethnographers as they are implicated in their own account of culture. “What narratives of development, loss, and innovation can account for the present range of local oppositional movements?” he asks (8).  Clifford does not deny the idea that the forces of modernity are disconcerting. “People and things,” says Clifford, “are increasingly out of place” (6). By the turn of the twentieth century, Clifford writes that a “truly global space of cultural connections and dissolutions has become imaginable,” and so the “ethnographic modernist searches for the universal in the local, the whole in the part” (4). Ethnographer Kathleen Stewart captures this tension with a sharp clarity in A Space on the Side of the Road (1996). In places named Red Jacket, Viper, Odd, Amigo, Twilight, and Decoy, Stewart uncovers paradoxes in American narratives of modernization and progress. There is an uncanny similarity between place names that refuse to adhere to conventional standards of naming in this account. The power of naming is a central consideration in this study.  A vivid cultural poetics of place emerges in Stewart’s text. Her stories are part of larger patterns of narratives that embody the contradictions in rural modernity. Modernity and progress are as ruinous in their presence as they are in their supposed absence in these places. They are evidenced in linear time but unrecognizable on the ground. They are always coming but never arrive.

My purpose in this project was not to look at the whole of place writ small in the landscape of Truth or Consequences, but rather to explore how a particular place could illuminate the sweeping ideas about place that proliferate in the wide-ranging literature I engage. While I ascribe to the contingent and particular, the universal resonates. I find in the particular and universal a similar cascade of implication. I do not claim truth in the universal, any more that the particular. Truth or Consequences has qualities I am drawn to, including gestures to larger place patterns that have developed during the last 100 years in New Mexico and the nation. There is a shifting, elusive and yet strong sense of place and a very curious place identity that is tied to various place imaginaries of the town and region. There is a commitment to historic preservation and revitalization in the past two decades. I am fascinated by the ways that this small place reflects larger patterns that emerged during the last century. I am often surprised by how often people’s attachment to places creates opportunities to critically engage a range of ideas, from historical veracity, to ideas about what makes good places. This project is not a historical account of the town of Truth or Consequences, but rather an exploration into the place identity of the town that explores and recounts a great deal of history. I explore the historical claims embedded in the narratives and seek to understand how these shape the place imaginaries that emerge, and how these narratives persist. I blend these historical considerations with ethnographic fieldwork in order to consider the persistent narratives and practices of regional place imaginaries. While I agree with Basso that place studies are critical for a variety of reasons, I see in the study of place an opportunity to fully engage in the kind of interdisciplinary study that draws me to the field of American studies. The study of place, and the concept of place, lies at a juncture where the particular and the universal come together.

As places like Truth or Consequences seek to create and market place identities, the fluidity and malleability of place can invite the kind of haphazard or fictitious historical accounts that persist for decades—the focus of my third chapter. As a historic preservationist in training and a critical scholar with many years of training, however, I am often confounded by the lack of critical perspectives in the preservation and revitalization of places. These conversations are dominated by contemporary ideas about branding and economic revitalization, but are also opportunities for starting a conversation about how to bring in a critical perspective. In the majority of interviews I conducted for this project a willingness by people to bring critical lenses to their own observations was abundant. People were keen to point out that their perceptions were just that, their own. Yet our own place narratives are created in the same ways that the places we describe are—through a full contingency of forces that come to bear on individuals and communities.

almost there...

Introduction

This is a research project about the place identity of a small town. It is a place called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Halfway between the 270-mile stretch between the sprawling urban centers of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the twin border cities of El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, this small town with a population of just over 6,000 lies slightly southwest of the geographic center of New Mexico. The town is probably best known by New Mexicans for its pop culture–inspired name change in 1950, from Hot Springs, New Mexico to Truth or Consequences. It is also known, if it is known at all, for it its hot mineral waters, the midcentury modern aesthetic in the downtown bathhouse historic district, its creative architectural renovation, its strong countercultural traditions, and its lively arts and healing arts communities. The newly completed Spaceport America and the large man-made Elephant Butte Lake also bring people to the region and contribute to the reputation and character of the town. T or C, as it is locally known, also has a reputation as a strange place. The idea that the town is an oddity in the state, or just plain odd, is present in many conversations. A t-shirt made by one colorful local entrepreneur proclaims, “Truth or Consequences: We Are All Here Because We Are Not All There”—humor that does a lot to explain the sentiment that is shared by many people outside of this place, and more than a few who live there. It has a reputation as a place inhabited predominantly by white people, who are rarely referred to as anglos, in a state and region otherwise known for its ethnic diversity. Truth or Consequences is something of an enigma in New Mexico. It is a hard place to pin down.

This projects sets out to explore this enigmatic place identity. I believe this elusive place identity has a lot to say about the dominant place imaginaries that emerged at the turn of the 19^th century in New Mexico and the region. Truth or Consequences emerged into the New Mexico landscape at a pivotal time, a new place in a storied landscape, an uncommonly particular yet surprisingly illustrative example of the how place were imagined in the region and by the nation. I do not propose to find the universal in this particular case. Rather, I hold this particular case up to scrutiny in order to better see the details in what may be larger patterns in how place is imagined, enacted, theorized and studied. I refer to these patterns of perception as place imaginaries, a concept I develop in this work. The turn of the 19^th century to the 20^th, marked a shift in New Mexico’s identity as the territory was seeking statehood. The turn of the 19^th century to the twentieth also represented a shift to a new idea of what it meant to be a modern place. It is a study in contradictions, which I argue is a defining quality of modern place imaginaries. Theses inherent contradictions of place, especially set against ideas of modernism that emerged in New Mexico at the turn of the nineteenth century, are evident in the town’s historical and contemporary place narratives, practices, and identities.

Three goals shape this project. First, the concept of place is given primacy. This is a theoretical research project as much as it is a consideration of a particular place. I am interested in what the City of Truth or Consequences and the history of this small area located in south-central New Mexico can tell me about place and other theoretical constructs, and how theoretical considerations inform how particular places are understood. I spend my first chapter considering theoretical considerations. Chapter 2 explores of two years of place ethnographic research in Truth or Consequences. I develop a structure based on a public research blog I maintain during my fieldwork. My public research blog is a mixture of reporting on what I am doing in the town, as well as philosophical and theoretical considerations that shaped my research and the ways I process my experiences. The second goal of this project is to explore how a particular place can potentially illuminate larger processes in many other places. In this I do not propose a big-picture-writ-small argument, but rather a wealth of illuminating details of the particular. The particular case has long served the purpose of scholars seeking more universal or culturally transcendent truths. The goal of amassing a wealth of details does not serve some universal ends in this research project; I do, however, make many gestures to the notion that understanding one place can illuminate and challenge the understanding of others. I consider how the case informs understandings in three small case studies in chapter 3 and a larger case study in chapter 4. 

Finally, in this investigation I seek to build a different kind of narrative about place, using an experimental method of place study based on contemporary observation and historical methods, small case studies within the larger place study, and theoretical contemplation. I envision this hybrid narrative and approach as one in which the linear sweep of historical pasts is disrupted by moving between the contemporary moment and the historic past. I engage this strategy to consider the idea that place is a fluid phenomenon shaped by mental as much as physical factors rather than fixed and geographically known physical thing, a static collection of people and material objects embedded in the landscape. I look closely at the places where history and contemporary ethnographical accounts meet. I look at histories where the tensions, contests, and paradoxes of place are most palpable. Place, in this research project, emerges as an ephemeral and temporary phenomenon rather than a fixed and therefore knowable thing. There are nonetheless persistent characteristics, patterns, buildings, historical events and other features that define places and shape the place identity that I seek to explore in Truth or Consequences.

The contradictions that define the town are even present in inquiries about my dissertation research place site. If the person who questions my town choice is a fan of the cool/funky/quirky/affordable/laid-back spa town, they think it is a great research project and get very excited. It is as though I am about to split a geode and expose the sparkling center of what appears to be an ordinary rock. Other people ask what I could possibly say in a dissertation about this strange white trash/dirty hippie/serial-murder/meth-town or some other demeaning variation on this description. It is a strong and repeating contrast. Each has a passionate choir, although the former edges out the latter by a wide margin. The other popular response I get when I mention my research project is the most often repeated comment that many have passed the town on I-25 on the way south, but do not venture beyond the gas station at the first exit. They always notice the name, however. A lot of people I talk to think it is a fine little town, and not really that uncommon, except for the name, of course. I started thinking about doing my dissertation research in Southern New Mexico in a general way after an experience I had as an intern in the Office of the State Historian (OSH) in 2009. At a lecture by one of the scholars, I asked if Southern New Mexico has any patterns similar to those ascribed to Northern New Mexico. “Southern New Mexico has no history,” this scholar replied. This statement was met with raucous laughter from many audience members, which included two elected officials. There seems to be a persistent idea that there is a vacancy of sorts, a particular kind of emptiness in New Mexico’s place imaginary in the south-central part of the state. I call this perceived phenomenon of emptiness a historical vacancy. The dominant place imaginaries of New Mexico are outside of my scope, but I one to illustrate my case.

This area is a crossroads for waves of people and empires in the region, a witness to national and world history writ small; yet it is also obscure, a peripheral place that is easily overlooked. None of these features is uncommon individually or as elements of larger global patterns. People come and go; this is the nature of a global capitalist nation, the mobility of the people with means or the movement of people going to work. But the town is widely characterized by its own residents as a pass-through place. There is something that is elusive about this place, something slippery and hard to pin down. There is something that has been described to me as sinister, or off, about the town, and the people who are drawn here, but these judgements are countered by the steady attachment and deep regard held by others. There is a constant contradiction that marks the town, a tension and defiance, and claim to be outside of the mad rush of modernity. The puzzling perception of otherness that adheres to its identity, its reputation, its fabricated and historical insights into the ways places are reconfigured and reimagined at the turn of the nineteenth century all draw me to research in this peculiar yet ordinary place.

The odd name of the town is the most prevalent topic of discussion, no matter the audience. Most people think it is funny, some think it is ridiculous, and some think it is fantastic. When people know the town they know the popular-culture history behind the name change. Hot Springs, New Mexico, became Truth or Consequences after winning a national contest a popular radio show of the same name held. The prize was a live, on-location, coast-to-coast radio broadcast; a yearly visit from the show’s creator and host, Ralph Edwards, for a parade and fiesta; and the national publicity that comes with newfound fame, promising new life. The name change reflected a frantic effort to boost tourism in an era when hot mineral water treatment for illness was rapidly receding. After World War II, many Americans turned away from seeking out home and other remedies in favor of health care dominated by new models of science and technology. The flow of populations to the West in search of better health trickled to a virtual standstill by the middle of the twentieth century. Boosters grasped at the opportunity for a national naming ceremony. The second half of the twentieth century found a re-named town whose landscape was marked by episodic revivals that constantly pushed back the sense of declining fortune and often triumphed as the town was again rediscovered as a place waiting-to-happen. Today, many residents hope the town can be refashioned in the current century as dreams of commercial space flight—to wit, Spaceport America, twenty miles southeast of Truth or Consequences—join together with the region’s oddly intriguing place narratives.

There are always wildly interesting people in this town that seems strangely elastic and unsettled, yet paradoxically strongly imagined. The newest wave of residents includes retirees, urban refugees, the restless, the artistic, and the fiercely different, who are a lot like the last few waves. There are people who come to heal and do yoga in bathhouse hotel courtyards, artists in residence, and famous artists as residents. There are the locals, as varied and storied as anyone, but who seems much more at ease with the town as a typical small town in rural America. There are the people drawn to the desert, one of the great and persistent place imaginaries of the American Southwest. Part of this research project is an attempt to figure out why the town continues to attract people by exploring the place imaginaries and place identity of the town and region. One of the defining characteristic of the town is the idea of becoming, and idea that is founded on nostalgia. I argue that the idea of becoming is a central feature of modern place imaginaries. This modern imaginary is partly a narrative about a rapidly vanishing and often fictionalized past, and partly a narrative about a splendid future. The future-is-bright people have visions of this becoming a regional healing center, an ecotourism epicenter, a noteworthy arts community, an off-the-grid sustainability center, a global spaceport destination, a hunting and recreation region, or some combination of these and other hopeful futures. Other, more cynical residents project not-so-hopeful futures that range from a slow decline by way of corruption and incompetent leadership and the vagaries of seasonal habitation, to a place for cripples and misfits, to a rapid descent as a methamphetamine production center.

The town is charming and desolate in turn. There is wildly inventive vernacular architecture in many unexpected places. Public art and private public displays of art are numerous. Incredible physical landscapes surround the town. Tortuga Mountain is the highest peak. New Mexico writer Rudolpho Anaya was a patient at the Carrie Tingly Hospital for Crippled Children as a youth. His book Tortuga takes its place name from the turtle-shaped mountain peak. The grisly, headline-grabbing activities of a 1990s serial killer (who actually lived in the adjacent community of Elephant Butte) are often linked to Truth or Consequences. There are wide residential streets with modest houses varied in style and material, ranging from adobe to candy rock to clapboard. There are small but pleasing early and midcentury motor-court motels and artistically restored bathhouses, tidy trailers, rows of tiny houses meant for longer convalescent stays that currently house artists and tourists. Dozens of places are being renovated in this riotously unique style of vernacular architecture that mixes art, reuse, and carpentry. Then there are the ubiquitous empty Main Street storefronts and rundown dwellings that characterize small towns across the nation, the occasional burned-out building, the poorly designed streetscapes and buildings of the 1970s, although this building are starting to achieve the patina of good-looks that age can bring. Trailers are ubiquitous. There are a handful of trailer parks full of giant, shiny-new RVs. There are rundown trailer parks where people live year-round in miniscule travel trailers and old trucks with campers. Perched above the meeting of Main and Broadway streets on the west end of town on a small bluff are trailer painted in shockingly bright neon hues. A few trailer in the downtown area overflow with gewgaws and knickknacks. Some are falling to pieces while others are meticulous. Alleys run throughout the downtown.

Midcentury business blocks line downtown’s 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 of buildings downtown is intact with a few large gaps, including a graffiti-marked cement wall once hidden by the old Buckhorn Bar; it was long-closed but Western-façade photogenic. I watched as it was torn down in 2013. A number of 1970s western facades remain. Some have been removed and the original building facades restored. Enough buildings have a second story to make the two-story massing characteristic. The color palate of the town has become identity defining, a range of hot pink, turquoise, and purple. The sidewalks are crumbling in many places, but many bear 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA). The downtown is a cohesive and distinctive enough area to qualify as a National Historic Register district. The Rio Grande runs along the whole west side of the town. It is either a swift-flowing river brimming with irrigation water or a sluggish muddy ribbon depending on the time of year. It comes from the spillways out of Elephant Butte Dam, through the steep canyons just east of the town, curves along the the downtown and eventually turns south to the Mesilla Valley before Interstate 25 at Williamsburg. Along with mistletoe infested cottonwood and tamarisk, a small community of houses sit on the south banks of the river. It is a two minute walk across the river, but a 20 minute drive east to the nearest bridge and back.

There is a commercial strip that roughly parallels the interstate on the north side of town. A Walmart and Holiday Inn, a McDonalds, gas stations, and other ubiquitous chains are the first sights a visitor encounters. If you look east from the Walmart parking lot, you can see the dam, in tiny concrete miniature, three miles away. The elementary, middle, and high schools are on the east side of town, as is the bulk of residential housing. Farther east you can see a more recent suburban neighborhood. To the north the the San Mateo Mountains mark the divide between Sierra and Socorro counties. Along the western horizon the Black Range stretches in both directions. Signs to the now-defunct high-end community, with a country club and golf course, and a dozen houses that are not all empty, still stand at the road that cuts east to the community of Elephant Butte. This commercial strip lines both sides of the road from the top of a long hill where Walmart now sits down to the historic downtown. Older box buildings, restaurants, and hotels, a Circle K and a bar, 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s car-court motels continue as you drive south, a mile before the road curves into the historic district, where it branches into the two downtown thoroughfares.

The idea that Truth or Consequences is open to violence, corruption and swindling, that there is certain looseness in the fabric of this place, is a strong narrative element. The serial murder of women in a small nearby community, linked to the town by virtue of the name, is still part of the conversation about the place, as is the torture of a preteen at Ralph Edwards Park in 2013. Skinny kids with rotten meth teeth and unkempt men with hooded eyes who stare aggressively are becoming more common according to residents. There is a growing population of homeless men and women, ever-more invisibly visible in the American landscape. This population mostly keeps to the edges of the town and live in ravines behind Denny’s, across from Walmart. Many town residents speak to the history of gambling and vice that marked the town from its founding. People tell you to be careful, and in the same breath tell you that the community takes care of its own. I have talked to several people who left town, devastated by what they described as feelings of abandonment or revulsion or feeling taken in and scammed. They begin with descriptions of their delight with the town. I have talked to others who described their initial perceptions as overwhelmingly negative, but who profess a growing fondness for the same qualities they initially rejected.  Most people are friendly in a small-town way. People constantly warn you against people who are not what they seem, or tell you they are, while simultaneously reassuring you that the town welcomes people as they are.

How places are imagined, and how we imagine ourselves in them, is as fluid as place. Perceptions change rapidly but are also enduring. The most intriguing characteristic of the town seems to be the difficulty of creating a strong place identity in a place that is, paradoxically, so strongly imagined. I argue that the town of Truth or Consequences and surrounding area 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 transnational processes. Woven into the narratives of this research project are observations and interview narratives gleaned from my ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the town of Truth or Consequences and the surrounding area and considerations on how place ethnography might be used to approach the study of place. This is a hybrid endeavor, a mixed method approach that I define as an interdisciplinary engagement with ethnography, history, cultural landscape studies, critical theory, and other methods I bring to this particular place study.

This work explores several historical eras. These are loose contours of the history, and the linear or chronological ordering of historical eras is often interrupted in this text. The first is the contemporary moment, the years 2012 and 2013, when I traveled to and lived in the town of Truth or Consequences to engage in place ethnographic research, the focus of my first chapter. The second relates to the era when the Apaches controlled the region. Their domination kept encounters with the colonizing Spanish in the 1600s and 1700s to a minimum, thus limiting the Spanish influence on the region. The geological realities of a marshy and impassible river lowland that is now downtown Truth or Consequences, and the deep canyons along the Rio Grande to the north, were also factors in keeping the Spanish and other colonial settlers to the east of the river, along the Jornada del Muerto, the “route of the dead man,” the 100-mile stretch of desert that runs between the Oscura and San Andres mountains on the east, and the Fra Cristóbal Range and Caballo Mountains on the west. Early settlers traveled south behind the Caballo Mountains that loom above the town and did not venture west to the current town site. Both of these historical eras are considered in my third chapter, as they relate to contemporary place narratives and imaginaries. The last historical period I focus on in chapter three came in 1950, when the town of Hot Springs, New Mexico, changed its name to Truth or Consequences. All three of these historical periods lend themselves to a place identity that remains strangely unsettled.

In the fourth chapter I look to the the late 1800s to the end of the century, when American colonial settlement became a part of the landscape of the region. The late 1800s found a few cowhands taking the waters and erecting a small building over a mineral hotspring, in an area that was soon bought up by the newly established U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The wonders of reclamation promised to remake the region, beginning with the construction in 1911 of a modern marvel that would be at the time the largest dam in the United States. This coincided with the town’s first population boom; it found the fledgling businesses set up by squatters on the reclamation reservation, joining a few others who had settled, and a single homesteader in the area. The hsitory of reclamation in the region is the focus of chapter 4. It keep to a more traditional and linear historical structure. I consider several key texts and arguments about the role of reclamation in the region. I argue that these are foundation moments in creating the dominant place imaginary of the region and town. The contemporary moment finds a reimagining of all these histories in various bids to create a stronger sense of place and place identity. Coupled with emerging new promises, like Spaceport America, a sustainable living movement and eco-tourism, the town remains tantalizingly open to place creation in the eyes of many people I interviewed.

Chapter 1 sets out the major theoretical and methodological concerns of this research. I begin my exploration of the town with how these ideas compare to my on-the-ground fieldwork experience in chapter 2. The central consideration of chapter 3 is how places become populated with histories. I explore three case studies. The first is about the Apache woman Lozen, mentioned in the most recent Sierra County Tourist Guide as one of the areas “most colorful characters,” in the region, followed by what seems to be a completely fictions historical narrative. My next case study explores the narrative of the local hot springs as a timeless site of peaceful interaction—a narrative that is popular at hot springs sites across the nation. I use both case studies to consider history, veracity, source in the creation of place imaginary and identities. I conclude chapter 3 with a look at the town’s name change in the 1950s, the most pivotal moment in the town’s quest for a strong and recognizable place identity. Chapter 1 establishes a wide theoretical lens to consider ideas and concepts related to the study of place I propose and undertake in chapter 2. The focus on Truth or Consequences in chapter 2, continues in chapter 3, but the case studies in chapter 3 one again widen the focus of this research. Chapter 4 explores the history of reclamation, shifting this project’s focus away from Truth or Consequences. I argue that understanding place in this part of Southern New Mexico is impossible without understanding the narratives that emerged from the reclamation movement.

Ideas about reclamation shaped the place imaginary of the region more so than any other factor. It is a crowded field at the turn of the nineteenth century, populated by railroads and world’s fairs, Wild West shows, migration and urbanization, statehood, and a frontier thesis that captures the imagination of the nation. But it is reclamation that rules this particular region; it creates the forces from which particular locations momentarily emerge as discernable. And yet the ties to the town of Truth or Consequences are tenuous, despite its origins as a squatter settlement on a reclamation reservation, and despite the fact that the town owes its place foothold in its first days to the business the dam brings to the town. This paradox, having everything and little to do with the town itself, are central to this project. My concluding chapter return to the town. I consider of the town. Even as an ongoing drought and resulting water crisis take center stage across the United States, the eyes of the town look beyond, to the cosmos, to space, which is, ironically, where many eyes in the town have been focused on for decades.