Pick three western urban centers: Albuquerque, Phoenix, and El Paso/ Ciudad Juarez. Connected as points on a map (Rand McNally’s road atlas, which identifies itself as an aid for the uses of ‘travelers’ rather than tourists ) they form an isosceles triangle which bounds not only a stretch of such ‘natural’ features as the Rio Grande and the continental divide but the U.S./Mexican border, a topographical fact blended with a political fiction that emphasizes the dividedness of this slice of what United States citizens call the Southwest . This designation immediately evokes one of the most obvious border problematics: the U.S. Southwest is Mexico’s ‘Northwest,’ specifically the state of Chihuahua, that expanse of low desert which functioned as a permeable geographical limit of the Mexican Revolution, an event documented and archived in the a local museum in downtown Ciudad Juarez. Yet acknowledging this difference in (national) perspective is only the easiest observation to make about the (historical and spatial) contingency of regional formation. Even before Pancho Villa’s army, revered and despised on both sides, rode from Chihuahua into Texas, before Jack Reed’s romanticizing dispatches– the reportorial complement of U.S. counter-incursions into Mexico proper– before Pershing’s cavalry arrived, this vague space of violent contact had already been reconfigured by the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo in 1848. Make this date a horizon, recognizing the fact that indidgenous peoples engaged in millenia of cultural production prior to this event.
The three desert metropoles chosen unravel in all directions, loose and wide-gapped. In Albuquerque, real and faux adobe blunts the edges of commercial tourism in Old Town, the city’s original center which has morphed into a cluster of boutiques and restaurants. The historical core of contemporary Albuquerque, Old Town is no longer the site of legendary forms of pre- and emerging industrial labor (nor the relations these modes of production entail): tanning, smithing, mining. Today, segregated from the rest of the city where the real business of everyday life transpires, Old Town stages the sale of curios to tourists in sunglasses and the work performed is customer service. Underpaid cashiers sell western-themed kitsch, and hybridized knockoffs of expropriated Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo artifacts– miniature dream-catchers to hang on your rearview mirror, T shirts embroidered with beads, turquoise and silver jewelry– at outsider prices.
The town that once existed there, however, and its web of social relations, subsist, echoed in the distinctively drab adobe and a scattering of weathered implements that signify the American West: wagon wheels, rusted pitchforks, etc. Thus Old Town functions in paradox. Visible, the ‘authentic’ Albuquerque, the preserved history of the contemporary city, and thus its shadow, a ghost relegated to the west end of Central Avenue, displayed for and consumed by tourists, Old Town seems largely irrelevant to locals. Such irrelevance stems in part from its peculiarly privileged position within Albuquerque’s larger economy, one which incorporates more real (though no less imaginary) commercial pursuits. The real Albuquerque, grouped along the length of Central Avenue, includes both brokers manipulating invisible shares via internet and the workers of the underground economy– panderers, prostitutes, dealers, and the police employed to control them. My point here is that even as Old Town claims to be the authentic Albuquerque, the strip– Central Avenue, which is, importantly, also the historic Route 66– constitutes the real Albuquerque of the popular imaginary. Here we find junky punk rockers bumming spare change and smokes, UNM students milling in coffeeshops, migrants looking for work, and Spanish descended New Mexican teenagers trawling the street in tricked-out hoopties. And it is this latter movement– adolescents cruising along Central, looking for something to do, performing a set of identities for others with bass-heavy stereos and customized cars– that we begin to see that Albuquerque, as a location, depends on a constant back and forth flux.
Phoenix, like all of these cities, is the epicenter of explosive construction. On any given day in the heat, carpenters, day laborers, and heating and cooling techs perform their designated chores among one another’s clatter. Phoenix could be a model for what urban planners ought never do; unlike Albuquerque, whose growth is somewhat impeded by federally protected petroglyphs to the west, Phoenix knows no bounds. The city continues to ripple outward, encompassing vast tracts of arid land, enclosing a space whose exterior no one seems to think will diminish. At the very core of Phoenix lie massive financial towers. Housed in sheetglass monoliths, the ganglia of the major American banking institutions– Wells Fargo, among others– are centered here, due primarily to Arizonaís lax fiduciary laws which allow banks to charge near-usurious fees. Yet it is at the margins of the city that we see a principle of motion at work which feeds a Phoenix imaginary; a fantasmatics of violent growth. Like the atomic tests that occurred in the desert triangle we have constructed using Albuquerque, Phoenix, and El Paso/ Ciudad Juarez as critical points, Phoenix takes the form of a rapidly burgeoning bubble, a superheated domain whose limits always move outward. As an ever-expanding metropole, then, and as a prominent nexus of national and global capital received and redirected in multiple directions, Phoenix’s motion resembles the bulge of a nuclear blast.
El Paso/Ciudad Juarez, by contrast, functions as a valve for transnational capital and labor. An urban center bifurcated physically by U.S. and Mexican RSAs as well as the Rio Grande, EP/CJ post-9/11, Year Zero of the newly amplified national security state, has been transformed into a wound in the norteamericano body, scabbed over with the hardware of surveillance cameras, fencing, and armed agents (DEA, La Migra, the military, local cops). In October 2006 over a thousand people gathered on the Mexican side to attend the first Border Social Forum in the wake of US Congressional approval of a 700 mile series of border walls. In many ways Juarez itself seems to be the laboratory of a dystopian future: narcotics-fueled gang violence, the serial-killing of scores of young female Maquilladora workers, grotesque disparities between the rich and the poor. Yet the city and its mlitarized northern sister is also a point of social contact which produces hybrid identities and cross-cultural forms. Avenidas de las Americas, the bridge that spans the border, is both conduit and site, perennially choked with pedestrian and automotive traffic, like a convenience store open 24-7. Here tourists and travelers can buy screens to affix to their windows and block out the sun, cold drinks, ‘native’ artwork, and maps. Those who sell such goods are routinely chased from the ‘American’ side of the bridge should they venture too close.
All of the trajectories thus far discussed occur along a horizontal axis. Within our desert triangle, however, we witness another motion which instead runs vertically. The area described is dotted with missile silos, some of which have been decommissioned and opened as tourist sites. Several old Titan bases are open to tourists who may descend to a subterranean complex under the protection of a guide who will emphasize repeatedly that ‘this was not a first strike facility,’ thus rendering the space benign. Rotating crews manned the site well into the 1980s; while one shift monitored the equipment deep underground, off duty personnel lived in base housing on the surface. In the event of a launch, the silo exits would be sealed and its missiles released. Those still above ground would be considered as good as dead. The surviving crew was provided with thirty days’ worth of supplies after which they would have to choose whether to remain underground and starve or to emerge to take their chances in the irradiated desert.
