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.