Desert America: A Journey Through Our Most Divided Landscape
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1250024145
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Desert America is an uninsulated wire running through the hard-bitten, right-now, rough-edged Southwest, a land still being born. Go ahead and grab hold: first comes shock―maybe of recognition, maybe alarm―then you keep buzzing for page after electric page. You can't let go."―William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness and River of Traps
The economic boom―and the devastation left in its wake―was writ nowhere as large as on the American West. Over the past decade, the most iconic of American landscapes has undergone a political and demographic upheaval comparable only to the opening of the frontier. In Desert America, a work of powerful reportage and memoir, acclaimed author Rubén Martínez explores a world of extremes: drug addiction flourishing in the shadow of some of America's richest zip codes, an exclusive Texas enclave that coexists with bloodshed on the banks of the Rio Grande, and Native Americans hunting down Mexican migrants crossing the most desolate stretch of the border.
Desert America details Martinez's own love for this most contested region and reveals that the great frontier is now in the forefront of the vast disparities that are redefining the very idea of America.
“overdone,” Santa Fe or Taos plopped down on the Marfa Plain. “But there was nothing here!” he says, echoing Andrea Zittel in Joshua Tree. “Oh, there were a couple of restaurants, like a time capsule, you know? Back then you could buy a house for thirty, a building for a hundred.” They thought about buying in; but the New York Times beat them to it. Every month there seemed to be another article in a different section of the newspaper—in National, Style, Real Estate, Art, or Movies. Marfa’s
old as the decision to give distinct grants to the two groups, which was in rooted in the theoretical rigidity of Spanish ideas of race and caste. The historical split has only widened with the advent of the modern casino economy. Pueblo tribes with vastly improved portfolios are less in need of political collaboration, although Hispanos patronize and work in the casinos. On the third side of the triangle are the Anglos, and every Anglo arrival (or Subaru-driving brown guy from Los Angeles)
speculation—and the ultimate, spectacular collapse of the boom—that came to define the first decade of the millennium. In the desert West this movement occurred everywhere, from the “techno-urbs” of Phoenix and Denver to much more remote and sparsely populated areas, some of which had been boomtowns a generation or a century ago under utterly different economic and cultural orders. As with the urban model, rural gentrification brought new arrivals—often as not, scruffy or not-so-scruffy artists
economic expansions in American history was nearing its peak, the political moment increasingly belonged to racist retirees who called themselves Minutemen and hunted immigrants in the Arizona desert, to nativists demanding that the Great Wall of America be built on the U.S.-Mexico line, to Republicans conflating Al Qaeda operatives with undocumented nannies and busboys, to opportunistic local officials feeding off the frenzy by promoting ordinances that would turn landlords and schoolteachers
with our head.” He proceeds to tell the Guatemalans that their search map is nearly worthless. “You were told that the body was left at the foot of a tree in a wash next to the highway to Arizona City, near a cemetery. Do you know how many places that could be?” The Guatemalans shoot each other looks. They huddle and begin working their cell phones intensely, speaking in their indigenous language. One points his finger north, another east. They draw up new maps. Word comes to look for a trailer