Legends of the American Desert : Sojourns in the Greater Southwest (9780307831811) by Shoumatoff Alex

Author:Shoumatoff, Alex [Shoumatoff, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83181-1
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2013-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

El Tigre

A few days after crossing the border at Ciudad Juárez, continuing to wend my way north with the Hispanic frontier, now in a rental car in 1986, I dropped in on J. B. Jackson, pioneer scholar of the American landscape, particularly the roadside landscape, and author of The Westward Moving House, whose course I had audited at Harvard fifteen years earlier. His own house, which he had built south of Santa Fe, was a big, beautiful, East-type, architecturally-in-tune-with-the-grand-tradition, unsouthwestern dream house, which I now got the feeling was sort of an embarrassment. He was living in a little funky adobe in front of the property, pumping gas at a local station, and, last I heard, cleaning people’s yards for nothing except the insights into the American domestic landscape he thus derived; having embraced at first intellectually the vernacular and the fellahin funkiness that had seemed so quaint and intriguing, he had finally ended up part of it. It was a process that many transplanted easterners I have met in the Southwest seem to have undergone. To eastern eyes, it may seem like cultural devolution, but cultural devolution, the actor Dennis Hopper, who lived for many years as a wild man in Taos, told me, is what this part of the world is all about.

I found Jackson dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket and boots, a small, frail old man with liver-spotted skin and a cultivated eastern accent (these things are hard to get rid of). His Harley Davidson, on which he still took off on field trips, was parked out front.

New Mexico, Jackson told me, was basically a depressed expastoral landscape, aptly named the Land of Enchantment, a beautiful but unhappy place that kept experiencing boom-and-bust cycles. He cited the copper, uranium, Texas oil, and natural-gas bubbles, the promise of dry farming that had been wiped out by the Depression; the bursting of the weapons-lab and military-base bubble was still a few years in the future. “The difference with New Mexico is that this is a projection of Catholic, not of Protestant, Europe,” Jackson reflected. “It’s picturesque but not perceived as important for the country, and it isn’t self-supporting anymore. It exists on federal money. Arizona, with its high-tech irrigation crops and its influx of rich from the coast, is a different story. Here the role of the mother is crucial. She spoils her sons so they feel they can’t leave. She chops the wood; the boys do nothing. A chance comes for them to go to Albuquerque or Denver and make something of themselves, but at the last moment the car isn’t in shape, or they find some other excuse for staying.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.