As the confluence of different cultures and the embodiment
of the eternal frontier, the Southwest has long occupied a special place in the
American imagination. For those of us who grew up in this region, it is hard
even for us to overcome the popular images and tropes that dominate even our
view of this physical and psychic domain. One thinks, for example, of lean men
with big hats and weathered boots, as sparse with their words as the skies are
with the meager rainfall that besets this year, or the abundance of withering
sunlight that grounds down both people and places like a molcahete does to chiles.
Images of isolated towns and ramshackle huts, of dogs and rattlesnakes camped
out under porches (but never together!), of magical and lush expanses of green
evident in so many golf courses and the endless expanses of air-conditioned
houses, many in a faux Southwestern architectural style that represents a
curious mix of Mexico and the Mediterranean, housing elderly Anglos who seeking
relief from the gloom of colder climes. I think as well of Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans such as myself, lying immobile in a sort of torpid
sonambulance, without the benefits of air-conditioning or summer camps with
access to pools, reading as I did science fiction novels such as Frank Herbert’s
Dune and wishing for an end to the
summer.
The Southwest is an open landscape that appeals to the
imagination. It is filled with formulas, with the mythos of a conquering people
who bought a fixer-upper and went about remolding it to satisfy their urge not
only to remake themselves, but also to buy into a certain dreamlike quality
that was associated with the idea of escaping the weight of the past. Perhaps as
Americans we don’t have a long historical memory, at least, not anywhere near
that which obsesses other nationalities, for example, my Mexican parents who
seem to relive on a daily basis the indignities of the conquest. The Southwest
hits different notes for different groups, but for all communities, I would
venture to say that it represents an opportunity to reimagine oneself free of
the limiting roles that are imposed by history and by what may seem oppressive economic
and cultural conditions. Whether we grew up in a small pueblito in New Mexico,
or the much larger but still cohesive entity such as East El Lay, we feel that
this is a terrain that is infused with a certain latent energy, a vast space
that, yes, is open to boom and bust cycles, but for the most part, is more
closely attuned to the idea of becoming, rather than existing. At least I would
like to believe that this is part of the reason why the individualist ethos
that proves so amenable Libertarianism is so powerful here, and is as much
prevalent in rural Arizona as in the more cosmopolitan Silicon Valley in San
Jose, California.
The romantic imagination has long been obsessed with
solitary figures in search for the conditions that allow them to express their
individuality without constraint. The individualist has a personal moral code,
and isn’t necessarily hidebound to legalistic formulas. Everyone aspires to
their own private domain, and even if so many of us live in congested urban landscapes,
deep inside, those of us who live in the Southwest with to assert authority
over this private expanse, to live as cowboys do. The romantic imagination is
always, so to speak, in search of a canvass to appropriate and fill, and thus
it may be that so frequently we seem to be that much more open to quirky
individualism, because to impose and pretend to dictate to others seems out of
place in a landscape in which we wish to assert our own freedom for
self-expression. I was reflecting on this as a way of explaining how it is that
so many different political ideologies can coexist in this region, and trying
to find the point of communality between blue-state California and red-state
Texas, for example.
The book Revenge of
the Saguaro is a collection of what we can term are sketches about the
Southwest, probing along the edges to find what unites this region. One might
be led to expect an analysis of a familiar laundry list of elements, but to do
such a thing would be to commit an injustice to this book and the intent of the
author. I first encountered Tom Miller’s writings when I read The Panama Hat Trail twenty years ago as
a college student at UCLA. I don’t know what attracted me to it other than the
promise of an alternative travelogue that would, hopefully, be less cynical
than Paul Theroux’s classic The Old
Patagonian Express. I found Miller’s
book immensely appealing from the outset, because it was structured along the
lines of a quest, to find the origin of the famous Panama Hat, one which
originated in Ecuador, and was produced as part of a long-standing cottage
industry in regions of that country. For someone who was a little frustrated
with his choice of study, but who felt that an engineering degree was the only
possible ticket for leaving behind a working-class background, I found a poetry
in that travelogue, and especially appreciated the deep sympathy as well as the
touches of folklore that were included in this book. Who can forget Miller’s
reflections on the ubiquity of roadside crashes, and the fantasy that, somewhere
in the Andes, was a village populated by fugitive bus drivers who were forced
to flee in order to evade reprisals by the family members of passengers who had
been killed in accidents for which they bore more than a small role?
There are many aspects and themes and notes associated with
the Southwest that are covered in this collection of sketches. Each one hits
several notes, for they treat different subjects and the transitions aren’t as
smooth as they could be, stretching as they do to offer coverage of a vast
terrain. This is evident in sketches (I insist on describing them as such,
because they don’t have the tight formal structure of essays, and because they
rely heavily on description and the evocation of place and time) that encompass
Ritchie Valens and La Bamba, the
significance of the son jarocho genre of music for Chicano activist, a George
Jones ballad called “Open Pit Mine”, and the evocation of a place called Rosa’s
Cantina, and the history of smuggling in El Paso. The transitions aren’t smooth, and they jump
between communities and experiences, but perhaps they can best be described as unwieldy
structures that are stitched together with emotion and a sense of yearning. There
is more to the Southwest than meets the eye, a hidden history that is arrayed
in overlapping layers that cross and permeate the landscape, and that are
reflected as well in other sketches.
The subtitle for this collection is the following: “Offbeat
travels throughout America’s Southwest”. If I could quibble with this subtitle,
I would take objection to the adjective “offbeat”, one which seems to me more
of a marketing ploy than a true reflection of the approach taken by the
author. It seems to me that the word is vaguely
patronizing, for would “offbeat” be synonymous with “quaint” and the evocation
of something that is familiar and comic but ultimately not threatening nor
serious? There is nonetheless a certain obsession with outsiders that is evident,
and as a seasoned reporter Mr. Miller was trained to seek it out in order to carefully
burnish and present it as part of what one would imagine is an approach that
has much to do with mordant wit of a modern-day Mark Twain.
There are certainly a wide variety of quirky topics as well
as characters covered in this collection. We can start, of course, with ornery
environmentalist Edward Abbey, the writer who did so much to lay the
foundations for the environmental movement by writing books such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, and who is
introduced in comic fashion in one of the sketches. Abbey’s activism encompassed
anarchic elements but also a deeply-seated individualism that brooked no
compromise, and that one gathers could make him a fairly difficult person to entertain.
He had his own contradictions, for while meditating on the influence of the
landscape, he was also quite happy to eat hamburgers (as if the cattle industry
necessary to produce this product were in any way more conducive to
environmental concerns) and inveigh against a sentimental approach to
outsiders, whether they be Hollywood types who were interested in consulting
with him on projects or what he criticized as “the Latino invasion of this
country” (p. 50), an unfortunate sentiment that sounds particularly galling to
a Mexican American such as myself who has heard it so often from so many
quarters, and which is used to construct the notion that we aren’t native to
the Southwest and aren’t entitled to a place. There are sketches of much less
accomplished but no less memorable authors such as Walter James Swan, “a
semiliterate author of no repute” (p. 213) who wrote a book with the homely
title of me ‘n Henry, in which he
cast himself as the neer’do well who aspired to a degree of authenticity and
innocence that was deeply appealing to those who came from the outside and were
looking for what they imagined was a Southwestern ethos. As a matter of fact,
this last character, as were most characters in this book, was deeply
sympathetic to me, and Miller was able to evoke their singularity while
revealing a self-deprecating note that shows us how he included himself in a
homespun fashion in this journey of exploration.
There are also stories of proletarian awakening, such as
that involving the strike against mining company Empire Zinc, in a region that
was notable for the existence of many one-company towns. Once again we enter into
a psychic landscape of paternalist structures, of an authoritarian streak that
bided no challenge, in which thugs were called in frequently to break up
strikes or to expel workers who proved recalcitrant. In a region of open spaces
paradoxically we still had these closed societies that were very unequal, and
in which communities such as the Mexican-American community were subject to
severe exploitation, depending as they did at times on the intervention of
outsiders in a formula that is common to many westerns. In one bruising
historical episode Miller narrates the story of one strike, and the role played
by a group of blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers who arrived in the scene and who
were able to undertake a retelling of this episode, producing the film in the
same community and with several of the same figures who had figured so
prominently in the episode. As the author notes, “The strike and the movie
blur; one defines the other” (p. 132), and by doing so, he also narrates the
transformation of one of the strike leaders, Juan Chacón. Miller is deeply
sympathetic to this fight and to the sage of the making of Salt of the Earth,
and yet, perceptively he describes as well the contradictions that would undermine
the legendary (fictive) qualities of some of these episodes and characters. The
thing about legends, nonetheless, is that they prove remarkably resistant, and
rather than erode the appeal of myth, they prove remarkably impervious.
Such is the case, for example, with the story about Jack
Ruby’s kitchen sink, and the growth of the memorabilia market. It is precisely
this need to tap into the legendary quality of these episodes and these
characters that we see how it was that, in the contention of Miller, this market
was first established in the Southwest during the tumultuous decade of the 60s.
It sprang, so to speak, from the national trauma of the Kennedy assassination
in 1963, and the personal experience that this represented for so many in this
country. This was an episode that was shared with the public in a very intimate
way, via the medium of television in particular, and as such was a tragedy that
loomed large and that hit many dramatic notes. Of course, one can’t help but
imagine that Miller is exaggerating slightly, for surely, memorabilia were
collected before this episode, and there must surely have been a market for
said items among collectors, but the author traces the expansion of this market
to conditions in place during this moment, the intersection of image and
commerce. What is notable was how so many prospective collectors expressed the
view that this type of acquisition represented a form of investment, while also
at the same time taking note of a certain historical aura that pervaded these
items, things that were traced even to the humble workaday items that had been
collected from Jack Ruby’s estate. As narrated by the author who was present
during this first major auction of memorabilia, Miller was present to document
the event as well as to join in the mania, intending as he did to buy Ruby’s
kitchen sink, an object that would have no other collectible value (such as
that accorded to Hitler’s luxury cars) other than that provided by that
mysterious aura of connection to historical events. It is best left for the
author to relay the results of this quest.
These essays are, quite frankly, embellishments on the
legends. There are at times attempts to provide an perfunctory explanatory
background, but these seem somehow incomplete, relying as they do seemingly on
interviews (such as those relating to the authorship of the item of food known
as the “chimichanga”, a creation of the Southwest) or on personal literary
sources, as if we had consulted our Tía Chencha or the cousin of a neighbor, or
obscure books that could easily be fictive imaginations. (As least that is the
impression one receives, although it may very well be that they could exist.)
There is at times a subtle political note in these sketches, evident, for
example, in the description of the strike against Empire Zinc, or the shooting
episodes that involve Mexicans being killed on the border (la linea refers to the actual border, whereas the term frontera is much more amorphous, much
more grander in scale, and refers to a netherworld). It passes judgment at
times, as is the case with the figure in the title sketch, Revenge of the
Saguaro, a title that is in itself a parody of the western.
As I wrthe narration of the experiences of a neer’do well by
the name of David Michael Grundman. A transplant born in New York, he enters
this collection of lore by virtue of the fact that he was killed by a saguaro
during a drunken afternoon in which he had taken to shooting the long-lived and
emblematic symbols of Southwestern (and particularly, Cochise county) wildlife. Leave it to Miller to refashion this story as
one of the outsider who terrorizes a community (of saguaros) and who engage in
a duel with one individual (we were treated, so to speak, to the life story of
this tree), where the purity and innocence of the latter triumph over the
malevolence and sheer stupidity of the former, even though both die. This
episode hinges on precisely this comic element that creates a pathos necessary
for this successful telling of the story, in which villains as well as heroes
are clearly delimited, and in which many of the themes of the book are
repeated: the endurance and hardiness of the native, the destructive energy of
the outside invader, and the romantic conception of a duel, a shootout, a
conflict in this crossroads of cultures and times and civilizations. It occurred
to me as I read this sketch that Miller omitted what would have been the
perfect simile to describe the saguaro, not only as an example of an ornery
native inhabitant who wishes nothing more than to be left in peace, but as a
symbol to the outside world. Think of the saguaro as a fist, with the middle
finger directed against the viewer.
(Doesn't this encapsulate what many of us imagine as the attitude of a state like Arizona?)
These sketches constituted an enjoyable collection of
stories that were filled with humor and colloquial turns of phrase. They
brought attention to a wide array of elements, symbols and characters that
exist in the Southwest, but that are in no way new elements. They feed in
precisely to the prevailing notions and stereotypes of this region, but do so
in a deeply sympathetic fashion that only serves to underscore the appeal of
these legendary qualities and to refashion them by connecting them into new
constellations. They point to the continual appeal of storytelling, and to the
ability to pounce on the telling phrases as well as the gestures and unexpected
connections to map out notable outposts in this fertile terrain of the
imagination that is the Southwest.
OGRomero © 2013
OGRomero © 2013
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