Albuquerque native Kyle Paoletta now lives in Massachusetts and has heard a lot of misconceptions about the Southwest. It spurred him to write his book “American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest,” which explores five cities – Albuquerque, El Paso, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson – and why the lessons learned in this region are relevant for the rest of the country in the era of mass migration and climate change. He's speaking in Albuquerque on Thursday and Santa Fe on Friday.
KYLE PAOLETTA: You'll often hear this kind of refrain of like, oh, how could people live there? Like, how could people live in the desert? And I have to explain to people, I mean, if you're talking about Albuquerque, the Pueblos were there for hundreds and hundreds of years before the Spanish came. The idea that it's inexplicable that people would live in the desert is just so baffling to me. So I mean, I think what I first got interested in with the book was explaining the Southwest to the rest of the country, but in the process, it also became a project of explaining the Southwest to itself.
KUNM: You have a great passage about a census taker who is trying to parse the answer of a man in Albuquerque who said he was not Hispanic, but Indo-Hispano, mostly Jewish. Identity in New Mexico is very complex. Do you see larger lessons here for the United States?
PAOLETTA: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think we have often told ourselves a story as Americans of you know, the melting pot, or the kind of like people come from all over the world are welcomed here and integrated into the country. I mean, you just have to look at our current politics to know that that's not really how it works, and that's not how it's ever worked. I mean, my own family were Sicilian and Italian immigrants who lived in, you know, terrible conditions in Boston when they first immigrated. My grandmother's family were Eastern European Jews, similarly, living in Chicago and New York before they moved to New Mexico as part of that wave of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century who went West, kind of trying to escape the intolerance of the America that they had first found themselves in.
So what I try to offer in the book is the idea of multiculturalism as a space for celebrating difference and for learning from each other, finding common ground. That is the thing that I love so much about New Mexico and being from here, is that everyone in the state grows up with people unlike them. The state's diversity is so inescapable, and it kind of allows us to have a much more complex civic and cultural fabric, which leads to some conflict, but it also, I think, leads to some real solidarity and finding common ground. And just looking across the region like I think it's really a different culture than certainly in Arizona or even Southern Nevada, where -- because those cities were settled by Anglos, and very much, from this idea of the desert is a blank space that we can fill and we can make it our own, and we can kind of pursue this like infinite leisure of golfing in the winter and whatever else -- that there was a real kind of white supremacist vision for what the city of Phoenix would be, what the city of Las Vegas would be, that I think is still with those places. And it's not just demographics, because I think the demographics are quite similar across the region. It is about culture and about not just the Census box that you're supposed to check, but like, how do you relate to each other?
KUNM: Your book lays out many myths and missteps that went into creating places like Phoenix and Las Vegas, but you also found policy solutions like Phoenix driving conservation by charging more for water in the summer to discourage lush green lawns. What are some other solutions the Southwest offers?
PAOLETTA: There is something about when your back is up against the wall, you have to make changes. You have to make tougher decisions. And I do think the Southwest is leading when it comes to adapting to those challenges. So, yeah, in Phoenix, you mentioned that they changed the water rate structure in 1990 it has a pretty enormous effect over the next 10 or 20 years, simply charging more for water in the summer. In Las Vegas, you know, there's the popular stereotype of the Bellagio's fountains, and this place of excess. Las Vegas, is the most efficient water user in the country. They recycle 40% of all the water they take out of Lake Mead, and they've become a real model for the rest of the region, saying we're using too much of the Colorado River or pumping too much groundwater. How can we recycle the water that we're taking?
What I am arguing for is just a little bit of a pullback from the idea of the Southwest as a place for endless growth, as that vacancy in need of filling, and a reconnection with the idea of this is an ecology like any other ecology, it has limits. If we learn to live within them, then we can have a sustainable society for a long time. But if we keep insisting on ignoring those limits, it's only going to get worse.
Paoletta is speaking Thursday night at Bookworks in Albuquerque and Friday night at Collected Works in Santa Fe.
