At the Omni Tucson National, strung along that desert wash, ducks feed in a pond by the ninth green. Great horned owls call from the cottonwood trees. A massage with hot stones in the spa turned me hallucinatory with pleasure. Hard to imagine what women endure, with the herbal wraps, wax treatments, and facials. Annick emerged glowing and limber in body and mind. Folks in the Legends Sports Bar watched the Lakers on TV and smoked Cuban cigars they’d brought with them.
For upscale shopping, check out the boutiques in St. Phillips Square. Have lunch at Cafe Terra Cota. Or wander the old downtown and for lunch go to the Cafe Poca Cosa. Suzana Avila re-creates her menu of vivid borderlands food daily. Order the mole, whatever flavor, and hope the corn tamale soufflé will be on today’s menu.
In An Empire Wilderness, Kaplan finds almost no urban planning in Tucson; neighborhoods don’t last long enough for communal ties to develop; Tucson is a city in transit, where stress indicators—single motherhood, juvenile crime—are all up. The Southwest is full of “low-wage one-story encampments with a high proportion of drifters and broken families.”
The neighborhoods that most interest Kaplan are the barrios, more border towns, governed if at all by the loyalties and authority of seventy-five known gangs. A retired policeman tells him of drive-by shootings and crack houses, kids turning into “monsters.” Kaplan says, “Tucson is becoming several garrisons, where each house is more isolated than ever before.”
Kaplan asked a former gang leader, “What’s a gang?” The man said, “A gang enforces order from chaos. A gang is about pride and respect.” He went on to say, “I know almost nobody in south Tucson who has bought into America.”
Spend enough time braving out isolations and you may find you’re losing contact with what self you ever had, and not ever at ease, that you’re forgetting why you should care about anything or body other than yourself, and wondering why not find some hideaway and give up on the worrying and fussing. In Blues for Cannibals, Charles Bowden quotes Jeremiah 12:11-12:
They have made it a desolation;
desolate, it mourns me.
The whole land is made desolate,
but no man lays it to heart.
Upon all the bare heights in the desert
destroyers have come….
Bowden tells of a hideout which he says “is nowhere. These people look to be trash. Dopers. Welfare bums, junkies, tax dodgers, traffic violators. Gun nuts.” Hideaways have been vanishing, he says, under golf courses and subdivisions. “But now they are coming back, sprouting up in the heart of our great cities, festering along the romaniticized blue highways.” They are the homes “of those who endure but do not endorse….” The estranged in nests, where the insulted go, where the contest for power and acquisitions is understood as fundamentally without meaning. Homelands for those who refuse, Bartelby and Melville. I knew a horseman on the eastern Oregon deserts who said that after a few weeks in the outback “you don’t care what they’re doing in town. Town is a fucking disease.” Like heartbreak.
Jimmy Santiago Baca, born in 1952, is a poet, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter. In 1987 he won the American Book Award for his poetry; in 1992 he co-produced Bound by Honor, a feature film about gang culture in East Los Angeles and violent race relations among prisoners in California’s federal prisons.
Baca grew up poor, first in a backlands New Mexico town called Estancia, then in Albuquerque. By thirteen he was in a detention center. In his recent memoir, A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, Baca writes, “After being stripped of everything, all these kids had left was pride—a pride that was distorted, maimed, twisted, and turned against them, a defiant pride that did not allow them to admit that they were human beings and had been hurt.” As a teenager “we’d get high, cruise around, maybe get in a fight.” He saw “the narrowing of life’s possibilities in the cold, challenging eyes of the homeboys in the detention center; you could see the numbness in their hearts…All of them had been wounded, hurt, abused, ignored; already aggression was in their talk…each of them knew they could be hurt again…”
Baca ended up in prison, in solitary confinement, finding solace in memory. “Stretched out flat on my back, arms covering my eyes, I would replay events over and over again like a sexual fantasy.
“I went on like this for weeks, reliving the fable of my life, rediscovering from my isolation cell the boy I was and the life I’d lived.” Remembering his childhood in Estancia was like recalling paradise, his grandfather carrying “me back home under the stars and moon on his shoulders.”
In “Martin” he writes,
A voice in me soft as linen
unfolded on midnight air,
to wipe my loneliness away—the voice blew open
like a white handkerchief in the night
embroidered with red roses,
waving and waving from a dark window
at some lover who never returned.
And so, thus, reimagining the story which defined his losses, learning to retell it to himself precisely, he began the process of reinventing his chances in terms of his emotional homeland, that which was most beloved. As I see it anyway; I have no idea what Jimmy Santiago Baca would think of my reaction. As he must know, the work goes out; strangers use it for their own purposes. Baca gives me heart.
The fertile valley of the Rio Yaqui, once known as Mexico’s Breadbasket, one of the most fertile regions in Mexico, on the Sea of Cortes south of Guaymas, is the homeland of Yaqui Indians, who grew and bred locally adapted crops, including wheat called White Sonora, introduced in the 1690s by missionaries. In recent years, however, the valley has been seriously degraded by the Green Revolution in agriculture. In both environmental and social ways.
An agricultural scientist named Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize for developing a widely adaptable, highly productive hybrid wheat fueled by large doses of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. The soil, a wiseass said, was only there to keep the plants from falling over sideways. Between 1950 and 1990, thanks to hybrids and the 250 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer added to each acre of floodplain soil, wheat yields in the Yaqui Valley increased four-fold. But another result of the Green Revolution was groundwaters and soils contaminated by heavy chemical use.
The cost of fertilizer is now a quarter of the cost of producing a crop; toxic pesticides, some applied forty-five times during the growing season, affect the health of farmworkers, and workers are chronically underpaid. Like so many of the poorest of the poor from all over Mexico, they are joining the migration north, to fields and orchards in the United States. The ongoing saga of NAFTA: agribusiness imports chemicals from the United States; Mexico deports citizens.
But this is not altogether a story about defeat. Guadalupe is a part of Phoenix, forty acres situated on an unwatered southside knoll, where dislocated Yaqui acquired the right to settle, and many have lived for generations. What sings to me at Guadalupe is bicultural religion (native and Catholic) which I take to be of universal validity, and the intensity of the ceremonies in which they celebrate it. A young stranger, on a cold night at one of their ceremonies, a girl with swirling red and green tattoos, holding a can of Coors, looked at me sort of wild-eyed and said, “These fucking people believe in something beautiful.”
The Yaqui believe their ancestors are alive in a mythological “tree world,” the huya ania, a version of the fertile Rio Yaqui Valley. In that world all creatures, including rocks and water, are alive in community, and converse with one another in a universal language, which is song. The Yaqui believe their ancestors, like those of the Australian Aborigines, defined their world while singing it into being.
They also believe in another world, the sea ania, a flower world, which is the huya ania as it blooms, a mirror of the Rio Yaqui bottomlands in blossom. Flowers are metaphors for all that is good and beautiful, and stand for grace flowing down to us from heaven.
Among the ancient Yaqui songs are deer songs, in the voice of the little brother deer, which
remind the Yaqui of the continued existence of the magical worlds which mirror the world in which they live. At ceremonies three men sing while a deer dancer, who embodies the spirit of the deer, which comes from the flower world, acts out the drama, an elaborate costumed version of the Christian myth learned centuries ago from Jesuits. Young boys, under vow to the Blessed Virgin, dressed like the Virgin in long skirts and embroidered blouses, wearing crowns made of cane and brightly colored streamers, dance to violin and guitar music. After the crucifixion and agony, after enactments in which evil forces attempt to capture the church, good triumphs, defeating evil with music, prayers, and flowers, and the young boys dance finally around a Maypole. The Yaqui believe that the blood of Jesus as it fell from the cross mingled with the earth and was miraculously transformed into flowers that filled heaven and the earth. Flowers are the reward.
The Yaqui also perform a “deer killing” ceremony, which releases the spirit of the dead from confinement on “this weeping earth.” The deer dancers and the deer singers are joined by the pahkolam or “old men of the festival,” who are stripped to the waist and wear small wooden masks as they mime, dance, and joke with one another and the crowd. Their clowning and “games” are rude and an often hilarious commentary on Yaqui society and the world at large, and counterpoint the dignity of the deer dancer. They pursue and kill the deer, singing as they do but jumbling the words and rhythms, their foolishness contrasting to the killing itself. The deer song finishes,
I become enchanted.
My enchanted body is glistening,
sitting out there.
The deer, after the dance, is laid on a bower of branches and skinned. It is miraculously transformed into a “flower” and reborn into the wilderness world, representing the deer who have died so humans can live.
A year ago, going south, we drove south from Las Vegas through Wickenburg and a vivid sunset over the Joshua tree desert, into the west-side outskirts of Phoenix at nightfall. Though we’d once lived four months in Phoenix, the interior expressways were numbered and construed in ways that soon had us lost in a doomed looping-along-at-seventy-miles-an-hour-in-the-night sci-fi dream. We circled into the abstractions of the mod-pod airport, through unloading areas, and far out to the fringes of the Maricopa Indian Reservation before returning to finally escape into Tempe. That traveling was hell for the privileged.
While driving the metroplex, even for people like us, sometimes hypnotized by the flow in our insulated CD-deck, air-conditioned way, it’s ordinary to complain that we’re feeling on the verge of being overwhelmed. Driving, and it’s necessary to drive if you want to get anywhere—there’s not much in the way of public transportation—begins to seem like a virtual activity. Traffic moves at paces not suited to the human nervous system. Travelers find they’re receiving way too many stimuli to process. This results in failures of nerve and purpose, psychic fibrillation.
E. B. White once wrote, “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.” Sure seems true in Phoenix, where car culture is semi-absolute. Hard to find a serious bookstore, but no problem if you need hubcaps
An editor who grew up there described Phoenix as “a hundred square miles of kitty litter.” It was an expression of disgust by a man who seemed to loath the city that circumstances intended as his homeland, an ordinary reaction among people who’ve come of age feeling trapped and bored.
Phoenix is part of a worldwide phenomena. Urban populations are exploding. Half our global population—2.85 billion people—live in urban centers at present. More than 90 percent of 2.05 billion people who are expected to be added to the world’s population over the next thirty years will be located in metroplexes. The “Third World” is only 150 miles south of Phoenix, and coming north. Count on it.
What’s happening in Phoenix is easy to understand. This is the West, this is America, and we’re individuals. Sure, we like to travel alone. We own cars and garden homes, and that makes us independent. That’s what Westerners tend to think. Thomas Jefferson would be proud of us. One wonders.
In 1956 Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway/Interstate Highway Act to create the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Our national frenzy of freeway building began. Between 1977 and 1995 U.S. governments spent barely 14 percent of their transportation budgets on mass transit and Amtrak; the balance went for roads and highways. The British and French, on the other hand, ordinarily spend 40 to 60 percent of their transportation budgets on mass transit and rail. An unintended result of the Interstate Highway Act has been the explosion of expressway systems within cities (36 percent of all federally aided–highway miles are in urban areas). There’s twice the roadway in New York City as there is in London, five times as much as in Paris. It’s my guess Phoenix would rank way out off the end of the chart, even though public transportation doesn’t cost any more than expressways.
Integrated neighborhoods have withered, insulating social and economic classes from one another, into posh upscale suburbs and economically depressed slums and barrios around dying inner cities. Any sense of inhabiting a cherished homeland fragments. Ultimately, moral paralysis sets in, a death of belief that any form of responsibility, like justice in our society, is one of our concerns. Look away, look away.
It’s argued that cities like Phoenix haven’t yet generated what most of us yearn for in terms of community—spaces organized on a human scale, where people walk and mingle, moving at speeds our interior animal, the old walking creature, is psychically equipped to find comfortable. But designers argue otherwise. They say neighborhoods exist in the malls.
There are three basic contemporary city planning models. There is the traditional, as in Paris, old neighborhoods connected by streets, buses, and subways. There is also the Manhattan model, the grid, each block and skyscraper its own island (except that Manhattan is of course patterned with classical neighborhoods and wouldn’t be livable otherwise). And there is the Las Vegas model, explored in Learning From Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour (1972). Malls and strip development were proposed as unifying urban locations. The most favored activity is shopping—the utterly commodified marketplace proposed as psychically organizing. It’s a model Southwestern cities have bought into. Phoenix has a run of bright upscale malls, like the Borgata and El Pedregal Festival Marketplace at the Boulders, and the Biltmore Center. They’re places where I’m inclined to be ashamed of my shirt. But who’s looking at me? Nobody.
Nobody, for the most part, is looking at anybody. They’re looking at decor, and the ways people have decorated themselves. They’re not looking at me, they’re looking at my shoes (and quickly away). They’re busy staying in touch with consumer culture. What’s in and what’s out, what’s coming and what’s gone. Shopping as competition, a sort of a sporting event.
Cities organized on a strip-mall model tend to lack stories which define neighborhoods and homelands. Cures are easy enough to propose. Acting them out is politics.
Governments make decisions that determine what life is like in their city. They don’t often provide much in the way of vision. They’re usually listening to wheels that squeak loudest—and the howling wheel in Phoenix is profit.
The loudest noises come from developers. Single-class subdivisions and malls—the consumer life ever more commodified—are the tools of their trade. But it does not have to be that way. Citizens can elect people interested in developing and preserving integrated multiclass, multiracial neighborhoods connected by buses and light rail, neighborhoods to which citizens might come to feel a sense of allegiance. It might even happen in an entity so amorphous as Phoenix.
But I should be careful with generalities, the curse of theorizing class. They’re always based on unconscious or conscious bias, and partly incorrect.
Millions and millions of people live in greater Phoenix, hundreds of thousands in Tucson and Albuquerque. It’s very likely each of those cities has many functional neighborhoods of
the kind I’m enthusiastic about. They need to be cherished, not rebuilt.
And, despite what I see as endemic placelessness, Phoenix has striking attractions, like the refrigerated room of kachina dolls at the Heard Museum, four hundred donated by onetime presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. They’re arranged in keeping with the order of the Hopi ceremonial calendar, and constitute a wake-up call to those who’ve never been exposed to the elegance of native imaginative thinking. The Frank Lloyd Wright workshop and home, Taliesin West, was built in the deserts east of Scottsdale, at the end of a long winding two-track road through the cactus, the towers of Phoenix on the horizon. Now it’s engulfed by tract houses. I like to imagine Wright out on his patio, making peace with time, the red sun setting over the desert as he aged and watched the canyon wrens.
(Note for readers: To visit anomie in Phoenix a couple of decades ago, read Dennis Johnson’s shattering “Angels.” A feel for emotional isolations in the Southwest can also be gotten from Leslie Marmon Silko’s scattered, fitfully brilliant Almanac of the Dead: A Novel. The more surreal qualities of growing up in upscale Tucson are profoundly present in Joy Williams’s recent novel The Quick and the Dead. And, there are two masterpieces, Silko’s Ceremony and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West.)
On March 21, 1981, the activist environmental group called Earth First! held its first national gathering at the Glen Canyon Dam. Their gathering was a sort of carnival, and culminated when five of them lugged a massive black bundle out on the dam, and let a tapered, three-hundred-foot streamer of black plastic unfurl down the long concrete face, to create the illusion that the dam was “cracked.” That joke established their presence in the national imagination more vividly than any amount of rhetoric.
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