Introduction, Or, Are We There Yet?

Introduction: A Study in Place 

This is a research project about place. It is partly an inquiry into how place is theorized, imagined, and understood. It is partly an inquiry into how particular places can be studied. To these ends and using an interdisciplinary method I call place ethnography, this research project is a study of a particular place—a small town named Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Halfway between the 270 miles that separate the sprawling urban centers of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the twin, border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, T or C lies slightly southwest of the geographic midpoint of New Mexico. It has a population of just more than 6,000. The place is best known, by those who know it, for its pop-culture inspired name change in 1950 from Hot Springs, N.M., as the result of winning a publicity scheme by the long-running radio quiz show and nascent television show of the same name. The community also is known for it its hot mineral waters and its compact downtown historic bathhouse district with its eclectic midcentury aesthetic. The town has strong countercultural traditions, lively arts and healing arts communities, and creative vernacular architectural renovation. The newly completed Spaceport America and the large, man-made Elephant Butte Reservoir also bring people to the region and contribute to the reputation and character of the place.

The purpose of this project is the naming, refinement, and grounding of a method I call place ethnography. I employ this methodological framework to consider theatrical ideas about places and attendant ideas about history, settlement, identity, belonging, place making, and other aspects of place. I conducted place ethnographic research in T or C from 2012-2014. The history of the region illuminated persistent and evolving place perceptions in New Mexico and the wider region at the turn of the 19^th century. I refer to these patterns of perception as place imaginaries, a concept developed throughout this work. T or C emerged onto the New Mexico landscape at a pivotal time. It was a new place in a storied landscape, an uncommonly particular yet surprisingly illustrative example of the how place was imagined in the region and by the nation. I did not propose to find the universal in this particular case. Rather, I held the particular case up to scrutiny to better see the details and patterns in how place is imagined, enacted, theorized, and studied.

T or C is something of an enigma in New Mexico. The town is also surprisingly representative. In concert with the ideas of modernism that emerged in New Mexico at the turn of the 19^th century and the town’s founding in 1916, its historical and contemporary place narratives, place practices, place identities, and built environments illustrate characteristic patterns of regional settlement. The turn of the 19^th century to the 20^th century marked great contests in New Mexico’s territorial identity in efforts to achieve statehood. Those few years also represented a shift to a new set of ideas about what it meant to be a modern place, graphed onto a very crowded imaginary. The town is a study in contradictions and paradox, which I argue are defining qualities of modern place imaginaries at the turn of the century. A T-shirt made by one colorful local entrepreneur reads, “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 by more than a few who live there. The idea that the town is an oddity in the state, or just plain odd, is present in many conversations.

I looked closely at the confluence of historical narrative and contemporary ethnographical and phenomenological accounts. I looked at histories where the tensions, contests, and paradoxes of place were most palpable. I considered how thinking about place as an ephemeral and temporary phenomenon rather than as a fixed and therefore knowable thing shifts the methods and conclusions of place research. I reflected on persistent characteristics, patterns, buildings, narrative retelling of historical events, and other features that defined places and shaped place identity in the field.  The town’s fluid and inscrutable place identity made it a strong descriptive case in the exploration of how places are constructed, theorized, narrated, imagined, and studied.

1.1 Research Goals

Three goals shaped this project. First, the concept of place was given primacy. This was a theoretically and methodologically focused research project as much as it was a consideration of a particular place. I was interested in approaches to the study of place across and between disciplines. I wanted to know what a method that made place its primary focus might look like. I was interested in what the city of T or C and the history of this small region could tell me about place and other theoretical constructs, such as identity and belonging. How places are imagined and understood from the viewpoint of people who live in them and travel through them were central consideration. The second goal of this project was an effort to create a different kind of research method about place and to build a different kind of research narrative. I envisioned a framework rooted in dialogue and engaged in interdisciplinary and dialogic methods but also a written account that was partly experimental. Disrupting the linear sweep of historical retellings, this text moves between the contemporary moment and the historic past between chapters and within chapters.

Lastly, I sought to explore how a particular place can illuminate repeated and shared place processes and imaginaries. In this, I did not propose a big-picture-writ-small argument but rather a wealth of illuminating details and patterns in 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 detail does not serve some universal end in this research project. I did, however, make many gestures to the notion that place understandings illuminate a wealth of important considerations of self, location, community, history, and other human expressions. The ways places were being reconfigured and reimagined at the turn of the 19^th century drew me to research in this peculiar yet ordinary place.

1.2 Choosing a Research Site

In 2009, I started thinking about doing my dissertation research in Southern New Mexico in a general way after an experience as an intern in the Office of the State Historian. At a lecture by one of the scholars, I asked if Southern New Mexico had any patterns similar to those being described about irrigation in 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. The humor was lost on me in my immediate bristling. It occurred to me, years later, that this comment illustrated one of the most persistent and contradictory ideas of modern places as a category of understanding.

Modern places, however defined, are considered historically bereft when set against the places shaped by older traditions. The tension between the modern and the traditional is a dominant binary place understanding. One the one hand is the idea that modern places are the sites of progress, but traditional places are rooted in ways that modern places cannot be. Modern places move with time; traditional places are out of time. The pride of history is embraced, even as the blessings of modernity are withheld. Other contradictions and paradoxes rise to the surface in this place study, shared and repeated patterns of understandings that configure how places are understood. What does it mean to be a place without a history?   747   722

There seems to be a persistent idea that there is a vacancy in New Mexico’s south-central region. There is a particular kind of emptiness in both the landscape as well as in the historical narratives of this region within New Mexico history. The absence of reclamation in the dominant narratives of the advent of New Mexico’s turn of the 19^th century modernity is puzzling. The railroad and statehood figure centrally in historical retellings. New Mexico’s water histories, however, are largely histories linked to the northern reaches of the state. These are dominated by Spanish colonial and First Nation interests. The other dominant historical place imaginary in New Mexico is a borderlands history. It is a history deeply tied to reclamation, in the chile, cotton, and onion fields of the Rincon and Mesilla Valleys in the southern part of the state. It is a history of a shared population, history, and boundary with Mexico. New Mexico’s dominant place imaginaries reflect these prominent histories.

The perceived emptiness in the historical fabric of a place is a phenomenon I refer to as a historical vacancy, which is a particular kind of place imaginary. The idea that history is absent or negated is present in many conversations. Historical vacancies are an important part of the place imaginaries of T or C and the small region where it is situated. Paradoxically, this area has been a crossroads for waves of people and empires in the region. The small region has been an exemplifier for the Southwest region but is nonetheless obscure. It is 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 to labor markets. But the town is widely characterized by its own residents and in several reports as a pass-through place.

There is something that is often described as off about the town. There is a common disparagement about the town and the people drawn to it. These repeated judgments are countered by the deep and celebratory regard held by others. The contrast is strong and persistent. The town has a long history of being characterized as either being on the verge of greatness and fame or of being on the verge of ruin. Many people express both sentiments simultaneously. The town 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. Yet the insistence that the town harbors no racism or other isms is almost universally repeated in interviews. There are claims that the town is outside of the mad rush of modernity, set against a historical pattern of being on the forefront of great technological shifts in national and regional landscapes.

The contradictions that define T or C are 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, there is great enthusiasm. 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 of this description. It is a strong and repeating contrast. Each has a passionate choir. The former opinions edge out the latter by a wide margin but are met by vociferous and sustained critical protests. Some of the town’s most adamant critics live there. The perception of otherness that adheres to its identity and reputation is strong.

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. What this means, to be a small town, fine or otherwise, or to be rural, which is a wholly different phenomenon, also is explored. The most popular response I get when I mention my research project is a vague puzzlement. People note they have passed the town on Interstate 25 on the way south many times but have never ventured beyond the gas stations at the town’s two exits. They ask what is there to study. This vexes many small, rural towns, whose viability as stopping places were severed by new transportation routes. My effort to focus place theories that use urban places as their laboratories to a small town and to the outlying rural sites was intentional. The divide between the rural and the urban is part of the national imaginary, but its expression in the town was unexpected.

The odd name of the town is the most prevalent topic of discussion, no matter the audience. It certainly impacted my decision to choose the town as my research site. Many people think it is funny; some think it is ridiculous; some think it is fantastic. The town’s name is its own paradox. It is one side of a two-sided coin. It is a reflection of the binary imaginary of Western thought, obscuring complexity and subtly. It is a mandate that asserts one dominant truth. Consequences are well understood in the imaginary of the region. When people know the town, they know the popular-culture history behind the name change. Hot Springs, N.M., became Truth or Consequences, N.M., in 1950 after winning a national contest. 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; along with the national publicity that comes with newfound fame, promising new life. The radio show’s replication on television occurred that same year.

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 20^th century. Boosters grasped at the opportunity for a national naming ceremony. The second half of the 20^th century found a renamed town whose landscape was marked by episodic revivals that constantly pushed back the sense of declining fortune, as the town was continuously rediscovered as a place waiting to happen, a place waiting to be made. Today, many residents hope the town again can be refashioned in the current century—once again hoping to shed its reputation as a loose place and emerge as a healing center. The narrative of retreat from the world, oddly in concert with dreams of commercial space flight—to wit, Spaceport America, 20 miles southeast of Truth or Consequences—join together with the region’s still-intriguing place narratives. Strangely elastic and unsettled, yet paradoxically strongly imagined, it is a place that embodies contradictions. These characteristic also make the town and small region where it is situated a strong illustrative case.

As my intellectual focus moved to place, I began to consider places in Southern New Mexico as potential research sites. I was intrigued by the absence of reclamation in the dominant historical narratives on irrigation and modernity in New Mexico. Mining is absent as well or also is mentioned only in passing. These are the dominant histories of this small region, however. More than these broad histories, I was specifically intrigued by the enigmatic place identity of Truth or Consequences. There was a strong and recent preservation movement that fit well with my academic focus on historic preservation. As I considered this site, I realized there was a strong component of many defining movements of history in the nation, region, and state, such as reclamation, public works of the Great Depression in iconic New Mexico styles, a pedestrian-centered to car-centered built environment, and counter-culture movements. Yet there was a sense of no clear triumph of any one moment, except this odd reputation for otherness in a state that has always been a little off the map. One of my research interests was trying to figure out why the town continues to attract people. The town is powerfully defined by its people, and I wondered what brought them, what made them stay, and what made them leave.

The newest wave of residents is made up of the restless, the ramblers, the artistic, and the fiercely different. They are relocated rural, urban, suburban, and small-town poor, working poor, and middle class. They are the addicted, the ecological refugees, the snowbirds and early retirees. They are physical, metaphysical and spiritual healers, the maimed, the disenfranchised, the mystics, and the small business-of-my-own dreamers. They are the small empire-of-my-own dreamers. There are artists in residence and famous artists as residents. There are the people drawn to the desert, one of the great and persistent place imaginaries of the American Southwest. There are the locals, born and bred, as varied and storied as anyone, but who seem much more at ease with talking about the the town as a typical small town in rural America. There is Ted, of Turner enterprises. He owns great swaths of land in the county and is building an empire based on conservation and ecotourism, which I discuss in the conclusion. There is a small population of wealthy people from other places who own ranches and trucks. They are a lot like the previous few waves of newcomers—divergent, distinct and astonishingly complex.

The importance of technological promise has long served as a narrative foundation of modern place imaginaries. The newest modern has always displaced the previous modern, but, paradoxically, this region always seems to be simultaneously ahead of the modern and left behind. These histories, cyclically repeated, also make this case fascinating. The original town site, incorporated in 1916, was part of a larger parcel removed from the public domain and designated a reclamation reservoir for Elephant Butte Dam. Agricultural modernity through technology was, at the turn of the 19^th century, a defining characteristic of place imaginaries. The capture and storage of runoff water was made possible by huge technological feats. The promise of these reclaimed waters was immense. Settlement, progress, abundance and transformation were imminent in the region, or so the story went. The name change at mid-century, in 1950, was an effort to attach the town to a new mid-century modern. The turn of the 20^th century brought dreams of space flight into the town’s narratives. The tension between these gestures to the modern and the idea that the town will never be considered modern is a tension well suited to a discussion of modern place imaginaries, themselves full of contradiction and paradox.

One of the defining characteristic of the town is the idea of becoming, an idea founded, in a strange turn, on nostalgia. Becoming, in other words, what you might have been. There is a strong yearning that defines the town. The idea of becoming is also 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 crowd has visions of the town 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. A small but vocal crowd of 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, misfits, and the addicted as the town’s rapid descent as a methamphetamine production center is realized. These convictions and conversations make for a very interesting and illustrative study. These, and many other qualities that will be discussed throughout this work, contribute to this research site as a dynamic location to study how a particular place is constructed, contested, narrated, and imagined.

I talked to several people who left town, devastated by what they described as feelings of abandonment or revulsion or feeling taken in and scammed. Their narratives often began with descriptions of delight with the town, often bordering on exaltation. I talked to others who described their initial perceptions as overwhelmingly negative but who professed a growing fondness for the same qualities they initially rejected. 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. Most people are friendly in a small-town way. The population peaked in the 1950s at just over 7,000 people and has hovered around 6,000 since. While several patterns and characteristics are place defining, the idea that the town is on the brink of greatness does more to capture the spirit of this place than any other narrative. One of the most intriguing characteristic of T or C seems to be the difficulty of creating a strong place identity in a place that is, paradoxically, so strongly imagined. This is changing.

1.3 Personal Connection Disclosures

My ties to the town and region also contributed to my research site selection. I went to school in the town, busing in from village of Monticello, in the fifth and eighth grades, in 1982 and 1986. It was a 20-mile, hour-long ride into town and back again. When I returned to Albuquerque, I was teased about being from Truth or Consequences. It was not only a small town, but it was weird because of the name, so I carried the stigma of being a weird small-town girl. My grandmother’s mother, Ruth Bundy Isaacks, settled with her family in the late 1860s. Her father, Emmit Issacks, homesteaded in the 1880s in Southern New Mexico’s Oregon Mountains. My grandmother, Imogene Gladys Issacks, was a two-time junior rodeo champion. She liked to tell the story of riding her horse from Las Cruces to El Paso, straight into the Camino Rael Hotel and into the lobby under the famed Tiffany Dome. She met my grandfather, Bob Berger, at a University of Texas at El Paso football game. He and ASE fraternity brothers shot off the Miner’s canon when the Aggies scored a touchdown, and hid themselves among the ZTA sorority girls. This is the story they liked to tell about how they met. My grandfather was a cattle inspector for New Mexico and spent a great deal of time on the road. My grandparents moved from Las Cruces to the village of Monticello (Alamosa Canyon) in the early 1980s. My uncle had a working farm in Alamosa Canyon in the late 1970s, which at one point had a thriving commune. He and his wife now live in Animas Canyon, a settlement 15 miles southwest of Truth or Consequences.

I returned to the region in the 1990s. I was a third-generation college student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and drove the 75 miles north to Monticello several times a month during my undergraduate and graduate years. I spend countless hours at the town’s baths and once-lively bar scene with college friends. I also have spent untold hours at Elephant Butte Reservoir. My grandmother passed away in Monticello in 2003. My grandfather spent his last days at the State Veteran’s Center in town and died in 2004. We still have a small house in Monticello, which afforded me a place to stay as I conducted fieldwork.

This sense of place belonging was part of my bristling at the idea that there was no history in the region. Yet I would have been hard pressed to offer any historical narratives, aside from many personal narratives, of my own. This research project pulls together my diverse intellectual and professional experiences and interests. I seek to build a framework to study place, and I set about seeing how it works in the field. This is not only to finish a doctorate degree, which is paramount, but because I want to have the training, skill, and tools to do place ethnographic work throughout New Mexico. 

1.4 Chapter Summary

Chapter 1 sets out the major theoretical frameworks of this research. I explore theories of place that shape this work, as well as the major theoretical works that serve as models to this research. Ideas on place identity, belonging, place imaginaries, narrative as well as other ideas are introduced. How places are imagined, and how we imagine ourselves in them, is as fluid as place. I include an overview of several place studies that shaped this work in order to create a foundation for the articulation of place ethnography in Chapter 2. Chapter 2 explores the interdisciplinary mixed-method approach that I call place ethnography.  I begin with a note on the source of the term, as well as the Institutional Review Board and role of dialogue. I then discuss the historic and ethnographic foundations of place ethnography as a research framework. I consider various elements and sources of both. I explain the form that place ethnography takes in this research project, introducing ideas of phenomenology.  In each section I introduce the elements of place ethnography attendant to the methods at hand. These range from historical sources to interview, observation and presentation. I illustrate these elements as they were engaged in Truth or Consequence in order to lay the groundwork for the research and findings presented in the chapters that follow.

Chapter 3 looks to the town’s founding moments at the turn of the 19^th century and the historical foundations of this project. This is the moment when American colonial settlement became a part of the landscape of the region. The late 1800s (supposedly) found a few cowhands taking the waters and erecting a small building over a mineral hot spring. This area, the current town site, soon thereafter was withdrawn from the public land entry by the newly established U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The wonders of reclamation were a narrative that promised to remake the region, beginning with the construction in 1911 of a modern marvel—the largest dam in the world outside of Egypt. This coincided with the town’s first population boom. I argue that understanding place in this part of Southern New Mexico, and the town itself, is impossible without understanding the narratives that emerged from the reclamation movement. It was a crowded field at the turn of the 19^th 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 region in my study; it created the forces from which particular locations momentarily emerged 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 brought to the town. This paradox, of having everything and little to do with the town itself, is one paradox of many.  

Chapter 4 begins with a review of the town’s history of historic preservation. This preservation history first emerges in the 1980s. A successful historic district nomination establishes the Hot Springs Historic Bathhouse and Commercial District in 2004. Folded into and emerging out of this preservation history are the most complete local histories readily available of T or C. I trace this history of the town, created for contemporary preservation efforts. I then discuss the role of historic preservation, as well as ideas about marketing, place branding, the creative class, tourism and place celebrations that are the center of many current debates about both what a town is and what it was. I conclude with an exploration of the town’s name change in 1950, the most pivotal moment in its quest for a strong and recognizable place identity. That also was the year that marked the end of the period of significance, 1916-1950, as established by the nomination for state and federal historic-district nomination.

Chapter 5 explores four dominant patterns that emerged during two years of fieldwork in T or C. The first is place as identity. Identity is a key idea place study. I explore identity as a personal reflection of self. I also explore identity as place character, and the ways these two idea overlap. The second theme is place as connection. The idea of belonging is central but is expressed in many forms. It manifests in the ideas of a cohesive community realized through support, watchfulness, and recognition, to the creation of an anti-community belonging. There are many points in between. The third theme is place as infrastructure. I cast infrastructure as land, which allows me to explore the ways public lands founded regional economies and patterns of place making, as well as ideas of recreation, use and the ever-present ideal of wide-open and accessible space. The paradoxical celebration of a rugged individualism, often made possible through access to federal public lands, is a part of this narrative. This last idea has a mirror in reclamation as a triumph of small landowners settling and building the region. This triumphant empire of small landowners is, paradoxically, made possible through massive federal infrastructure projects.  The last theme is place as position, both economically and geographically. This extends these ideas into a conversation on the rural periphery and the small downtown urban core, and economic struggles in both places.

The central consideration of Chapter 6 is the intersection of place, identity, and history. I focus on a particular kind of historical narratives I call topofabulas, or place fables. Topofabulas are part oral history, part myth, and part invention, but claimed as historical truth and central to place history and place character. I also explore a phenomenon I call a historical vacancy.  This is a particular kind of place imaginary that I see at work in this part of southern New Mexico. This region is strangely absent from a lot of New Mexico historical accounts. Mining and reclamation do not seem to figure into many accounts of New Mexico’s pasts, despite their historical prominence. After continual questions about the town’s origins I realize that the Apache history of the region is what a lot of new comers seek—the conquest of the prior occupants. They are not satisfied with the squatter origin story of the town. Historical vacancies and topofabulas are closely related. I use two extensive case studies to consider history, veracity, and source in the creation of these narratives. The first is about the Chihene Nde woman Lozen. She emerges as a central historical figure in the most recent promotional place history of the town. It is a contemporary place narrative that is mostly fictitious. I write about Lozen and the Chihene Nde, also known as Warm Springs or Red Paint Apache Nation, in my public research blog. I receive an unexpectedly fierce response from the community. The second case study explores the narrative of hot mineral springs as First Nation sacred places and inter-tribal neutral zones. This sacred spring’s narrative is repeated in promotional literature and histories of hot springs sites across the nation. The local version is called the ‘Geronimo Soaked Here’ narrative. I conclude with a brief consideration of several other established and emergent topofabulas, and the work that these stories do in the creation of place.

This project’s conclusion returns to the town and the present historical moment. The contemporary moment finds a reimagining of many histories in various bids to create a stronger sense of place and place identity. Coupled with emerging developments, such as 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. 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 for decades.