TWELVE years ago I was broke, broken and on drugs in Mexico City, one of the most densely populated places on earth, and I dragged myself to the Mojave in California, one of the loneliest. I was following a deep tradition of healing journeys to the desert. The consumptives of the 19th century came to soothe their lungs in the dry, clean air; the Christian mystics of the fourth century retreated far from the Nile River Valley into their desert cells, seeking spiritual transformation. In recent years, the desert West has seized the imagination of a new generation of Americans from both coasts with the means to buy a vacation house in Sedona, Ariz., Joshua Tree, Calif., or Marfa, Tex.
At the same time, the desert has received new denizens from other social stations — working-class refugees from gentrified cities, immigrants from Asia and Latin America. I was among the cohort who went because it was cheap. I started to put my life back together, aided by the relative quiet that characterizes a landscape that is simultaneously considered so utterly alien and so iconically American. But I eventually realized that the place I’d come to to purify body and spirit was anything but pure. Nearly everywhere I encountered precisely what I’d been running away from: poverty, racial tensions, drugs, addiction, smuggling-related violence.
After a few years, because of my family and career, I had to leave the desert and move to Los Angeles. Then, last summer, more than a decade after I left Mexico City, my nephew Noah made a healing journey whose itinerary was the opposite of mine. He abandoned my wife’s and his hometown, Albuquerque, to take refuge with us, fleeing the desert that I fled to.
He is a smart, earnest kid who is every inch his 21 years, with progressively large black “gauges” expanding the already gaping holes in his earlobes and a prominent piercing across the bridge of his nose. He’d gotten himself into trouble in Albuquerque. Noah and his mother, my sister-in-law, struggled for years in the desert of drugs, and he knew he had to leave.
Noah is a Westerner, even if our popular notions of the region haven’t caught up to the way it’s lived today. His parents are Mexican-American and African-American. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood devastated by addiction and incarceration. For his generation, the desert landscape that has served as symbolic touchstone for American natural grandeur — prime real estate for those seeking detachment and spiritual renewal — is increasingly phantasmagorical.
Migrants from Mexico and Central America are fed methamphetamine by the coyotes who are rushing them along the trails. Drug smugglers, crossing the desert en route to the rest of the country, drop off samples along the way, like pharmaceutical company reps trying to open up new markets. Just south of the border, in Mexico’s “gran desierto,” the drug war rages, indifferent to the cowboy antics of “America’s Toughest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio. The violence of turf battles and hideous mutilations correlates with spiking rates of abuse and overdose on this side of the line, on Native American reservations and in the shadow of the tourist destinations.
Adding to the strain is the fact that the desert West has endured a heavy burden in the Great Recession. Its foreclosure rates are among the highest in the nation. Two states — Nevada and California — still have unemployment rates hovering around 10 percent. Call it desert capitalism. Or the desert of capitalism.
Yet very little of Noah’s West is visible to the rest of the country. The region’s tourist imagery (aided by the artistic brilliance of the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams) has proved extraordinarily resilient in spite of what lurks just beyond the edges of the frame. Take, for example, the Santuario de Chimayo, a Catholic shrine that is one of northern New Mexico’s most popular destinations. Entrenched poverty and heroin addiction exist within yards of the old church and its pit of holy dirt, said to hold miraculous healing powers. The tourist is shielded from that sight by the living diorama of the Old West.
This is a shame, because the American desert stands for the extremes we endure as a country. It is a place of radical growth at opposite ends of the economy, of increasing diversity and the nativist reaction against it. It highlights the utter failure of the “war on drugs” to stem the tide of smuggling and abuse. The Old West brought us Arizona’s draconian immigration law; the New West helped elect and re-elect Barack Obama, with Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado swinging into the blue column. And, of course, as troubled as the region is, it’s still vast enough to harbor the kind of natural beauty that drew me and countless others to it. The beauty is still there, alongside the darkness.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, my newly clean nephew and I have taken to watching episodes of the television series “Breaking Bad.” We imagine ourselves versions of the show’s protagonists: Walt, the chemistry teacher who stumbles into manufacturing meth while fighting cancer, and his protégé, Jesse, who gets by the way many young Westerners do — scheming and scamming in a world where drugs are the central fact of life.
As we watch ourselves on-screen, we share our war stories, reliving the highs and the crashes. We also recognize many of the locations in Albuquerque, where the series is set and filmed. Hey, that’s the gas station by Grandma’s, Noah will say, or I’ll spot an old restaurant whose green chile I miss. Sometimes, we catch sight of the rusty-hued Sandia Mountains in the distance — the land I desired for its purity and Noah fled for its fallenness.
Rubén Martínez, a professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University, is the author of “Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West.”
At the same time, the desert has received new denizens from other social stations — working-class refugees from gentrified cities, immigrants from Asia and Latin America. I was among the cohort who went because it was cheap. I started to put my life back together, aided by the relative quiet that characterizes a landscape that is simultaneously considered so utterly alien and so iconically American. But I eventually realized that the place I’d come to to purify body and spirit was anything but pure. Nearly everywhere I encountered precisely what I’d been running away from: poverty, racial tensions, drugs, addiction, smuggling-related violence.
After a few years, because of my family and career, I had to leave the desert and move to Los Angeles. Then, last summer, more than a decade after I left Mexico City, my nephew Noah made a healing journey whose itinerary was the opposite of mine. He abandoned my wife’s and his hometown, Albuquerque, to take refuge with us, fleeing the desert that I fled to.
He is a smart, earnest kid who is every inch his 21 years, with progressively large black “gauges” expanding the already gaping holes in his earlobes and a prominent piercing across the bridge of his nose. He’d gotten himself into trouble in Albuquerque. Noah and his mother, my sister-in-law, struggled for years in the desert of drugs, and he knew he had to leave.
Noah is a Westerner, even if our popular notions of the region haven’t caught up to the way it’s lived today. His parents are Mexican-American and African-American. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood devastated by addiction and incarceration. For his generation, the desert landscape that has served as symbolic touchstone for American natural grandeur — prime real estate for those seeking detachment and spiritual renewal — is increasingly phantasmagorical.
Migrants from Mexico and Central America are fed methamphetamine by the coyotes who are rushing them along the trails. Drug smugglers, crossing the desert en route to the rest of the country, drop off samples along the way, like pharmaceutical company reps trying to open up new markets. Just south of the border, in Mexico’s “gran desierto,” the drug war rages, indifferent to the cowboy antics of “America’s Toughest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio. The violence of turf battles and hideous mutilations correlates with spiking rates of abuse and overdose on this side of the line, on Native American reservations and in the shadow of the tourist destinations.
Adding to the strain is the fact that the desert West has endured a heavy burden in the Great Recession. Its foreclosure rates are among the highest in the nation. Two states — Nevada and California — still have unemployment rates hovering around 10 percent. Call it desert capitalism. Or the desert of capitalism.
Yet very little of Noah’s West is visible to the rest of the country. The region’s tourist imagery (aided by the artistic brilliance of the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams) has proved extraordinarily resilient in spite of what lurks just beyond the edges of the frame. Take, for example, the Santuario de Chimayo, a Catholic shrine that is one of northern New Mexico’s most popular destinations. Entrenched poverty and heroin addiction exist within yards of the old church and its pit of holy dirt, said to hold miraculous healing powers. The tourist is shielded from that sight by the living diorama of the Old West.
This is a shame, because the American desert stands for the extremes we endure as a country. It is a place of radical growth at opposite ends of the economy, of increasing diversity and the nativist reaction against it. It highlights the utter failure of the “war on drugs” to stem the tide of smuggling and abuse. The Old West brought us Arizona’s draconian immigration law; the New West helped elect and re-elect Barack Obama, with Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado swinging into the blue column. And, of course, as troubled as the region is, it’s still vast enough to harbor the kind of natural beauty that drew me and countless others to it. The beauty is still there, alongside the darkness.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, my newly clean nephew and I have taken to watching episodes of the television series “Breaking Bad.” We imagine ourselves versions of the show’s protagonists: Walt, the chemistry teacher who stumbles into manufacturing meth while fighting cancer, and his protégé, Jesse, who gets by the way many young Westerners do — scheming and scamming in a world where drugs are the central fact of life.
As we watch ourselves on-screen, we share our war stories, reliving the highs and the crashes. We also recognize many of the locations in Albuquerque, where the series is set and filmed. Hey, that’s the gas station by Grandma’s, Noah will say, or I’ll spot an old restaurant whose green chile I miss. Sometimes, we catch sight of the rusty-hued Sandia Mountains in the distance — the land I desired for its purity and Noah fled for its fallenness.
Rubén Martínez, a professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University, is the author of “Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West.”
