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.