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5.0 out of 5 stars
Homelands are emotional homes, January 24, 2004
This review is from: Southwestern Homelands (National Geographic Directions) (Hardcover)
In the upper Rockies movement south is pervasive. There is a yearning for nomadism. In the Southwest landforms are impossible to ignore. Human settlement runs up against aridity in the Southwest. The author first visited the Southwest in 1968 after attending writers' school at the University of Iowa. By 1976 Kittredge was saying that the American West was a manufactured story and it was in need of retelling. Kittredge writes that Edward Abbey wrote that the desert says nothing. Doug Peacock showed him that the Sonoran Desert ecology was as complex as that of a rain forest. It is an Arizona custom to seek wild flowers in the spring.
The most secure homeland is the coherent self. Homelands are emotional homes. Homelands may be vast or small, overlapping, defined in many ways. Native cultures are stoic, mystical, ironic, and practical. High cultures in the Southwest were on the frontier. The pueblos were built to support a ceremonial system. The growth of native cultures in the Southwest was interrupted by Spanish warriors and Catholic priests. The Spanish never converted the Navajo to Catholicism or exerted much political control.
Richard Wetherill and his brothers found the concentration of cliff dwellings in 1888, now the center piece of Mesa Verde National Park. Eventually they found 182 sites on Mesa Verde. They were the first to discover evidence of the Basketmakers who lived in the Southwest two thousand years before the Anasazi. Elaborate communal rituals sanctify vital relationships between communities and the natural world. The author was told by Gloria Emerson, a Navajo, to think of the mountains as books, instructing people. The Hopi believe in repetition and order, (not in contemporary man's belief in the need to reinvent one's self). The Hopi live in a one-to-one trade-off relationship with sacredness. The Hopi encourage rain to fall for the corn. Without rain, there is no corn. When the Hopi die they become benevolent beings known as Kachinas, becoming Cloud People. The Hopis are one of the few precontact cultures surviving in the United States. Everything in Hopi belief is dependent on rainfall. Hopi pueblos and Zuni pueblos are notable for their isolation. Ruth Benedict viewed Zuni culture as Apollonian.
A couple of hundred years ago the culture of Spanish New Mexico solidified into a caste system. Intellectuals and artists tried to carve out utopian communities at Carmel, Provincetown, Woodstock. Homelands are cemented by networks of story. The colony of the 1920's in Taos/Santa Fe was inspired and orchestrated by Mabel Dodge Luhan. In 1918 she built an adobe mansion near Taos Pueblo. She put up famous people including Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Aldous Huxley, Georgia O'Keefe, and D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence, who was initially entranced, moved on, but his widow, Frieda, lived out her life in New Mexico. Georgia O'Keefe came to New Miexico in 1929. In 1940 she bought an adobe house at Ghost Ranch. After 1946 she moved to New Mexico to stay where she died in 1986 at age 98. Mabel Dodge Luhan visualized an oasis culture.
Robert Oppenheimer took a pack trip in the area in 1937. He proposed the site for a weapons laboratory in 1942. The New Mexico corridor now has the highest percentage of Ph.D.'s. Santa Fe style is a look. Obsessional people gravitate to deserts. The author has encountered enclaves based on class-distinction. Going to resorts is like going to another country. Kittredge believes a deeply anti-democratic culture is forming in the Southwest. Emotionally gridlocked communities are everywhere in the Southwest.
The real issue in negotiating with rural enclaves is respect. If killing off species to extinction is insanity, shouldn't killing rural communities be considered insanity? Maintaining responsible educated social coherency in rural America is needed. Unfortunately for ranchers, the range livestock industry is not understood as necessary. NAFTA has spawned maquiladoras at the Mexican border closing plants in the US and Canada. Kittredge maintains that drugs are a huge shadow economy in Mexico and that if the war on drugs succeeded, Mexico's economy would be shattered. Economic stimulus and social aid should be aimed at the disenfranchised in urban ghettos and backland villages. Charles Borden in JUAREZ has collected pictures by street phtotographers of horrific conditions.
Tucson began as a desert trading center. It is asserted that there has been almost no urban planning in Tucson. Tucson is a city in transit. More than 90% of the future world population will be located in metroplexes. An unintended consequence of the Interstate Highway Act is the explosion of expressway systems in cities. Integrated neighborhoods have withered.
There are three city planning models based on Paris, (classic), New York, (skyscraper), and Las Vegas with malls and strip development. Cities organized on a strip-mall model tend to lack stories.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable and informative journey, December 4, 2011
This review is from: Southwestern Homelands (National Geographic Directions) (Hardcover)
This was my introduction to this National Geographic series of locale based books written by famous authors. I chose this one because it is from my region. I would recommend it, particularly if you do live in the southwestern region of the US. It was good, but I also really liked (maybe more), Oaxaca Journal from Oliver Sacks. Instead of writing about neurology as his readers have come to know him for, he wrote about his ferns in Mexico. Check that one out too.
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