.. so use that as a launching point. and the third is easier for content. and this is where the islamists have considerable confidence in radicalizing people with radical oriented islamists content. so we have an edge in the first

two areas. you have the israelis. the most skilled people also are, probably the governments behind russia and china are very good at that stuff. that will come into any competition held with them. content -- they are more skilled than we are, but we should certainly use whatever weapons we can. >> let's give john a round of applause. [applause] >> ruben martinez travels to the american west and presents his thoughts on the changing landscape in the toll of the recent economic recession is not on the residents of the region. this hour-long program is next on booktv.

[applause] >> thank you. thank you so much for being here. do it to turn out one on? their ego. there we go. thank you, chris for welcoming me into you all for coming out tonight. as the fog rolled in -- angela, my partner and i came in from the east bay today where there is no fog right now of course. but we saw as we were making our way west into the fog and i said, were really far from the desert here. but fascists at united of course in one way. the desert is a physical place of course, but a metaphysical place, a flood of posts based. we use the term desert as a

metaphor for a lot of things. we were first cities to food deserts, for example. that's become a powerful trope in recent years. this book in particular deals, i'd bank, at a tired but several deserts, but ultimately the subtitle is boom and bust in the new old west. so i'm looking out the way the economy affects their lives, and with the economy gets into our very bodies. it is a book that i wrote the taz by body arrived in the desert under very particular circumstances. in the winter of 1987, when i was broke, european and on

drugs. i was in mexico city where i have been lucky enough to go under a book contract from new york. i got an advance from a new york publisher to write a book. it was a dream come true and in mexico city by november 1997, i had crossed the deadline and i didn't have a word written. and i was broke and i called the only friend that i could count on at that point because my lifestyle had led me to destroy a lot of personal relationships. i called my friend tommy performance artist that i've met through the solidarity network. politics back in the 1980s. and i said, [speaking in spanish] and she happened to be living at joshua cheney at that particular time.

there's a whole set of circumstances that led her fascists in the tropics of central america. how did she wind up in the desert? everybody has a story of how they got there. she said will take care of you. we'll give you a place to live and shortly thereafter i arrived in the desert. one of the first things that i saw when i rented my little shack next to a sign that said services 100 miles, the town of twentynine palms come is to joshua tree, i felt myself driven to go further and further out. they were in the village at joshua tree, which is the issue of beautiful national park. the guy said the joshua tree, right? to joshua tree -- you know to joshua tree looks like. crazy arms going this way and that. wow, i want to go further out.

there is something existential ghostwriting me further and further out into nothing, the big empty as they say about. and also because the further you went from iraq are cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. so i was paying $275 a month for a two bedroom house with five acres of land on the edge of twentynine palms, right where the sign said next 100 miles. and that is where this book begins. it begins with a personal crisis and it was no accident that i arrived in this particular landscape. ultimately the desert has been the site of restorative pilgrimage for millennia. and at that particular moment, i don't think i was aware of what i was doing. i didn't say to myself, in big trouble with my life i must go to heal in the desert. but ultimately, that's the space

i was venturing. later on i realized that all the symbolism was there to receive me and began the process of healing and getting to know this place, which included almost immediately dealing with the fact that i was arriving on a landscape that had as many problems as mexico city with drugs. i was coming from a place of addiction and all the pain and struggle that goes with that and arriving at a place where math was devotees, meth labs were exploding and were young marines were training and doing lots of drugs to escape the terrible reality in their heads and not in their bodies. so if i was going to a site that carried some ancient symbolism of restorative healing pilgrimage, i was also entering

a place that was the opposite of that, a phantasmagorical place. many years after i moved to joshua tree and twentynine palms, actually just a few years later i met my partner, angela garcia, who happens to be sitting in the audience tonight cartridges at stanford and has also written a wonderful book and many base about the desert called the pastoral clinic, about addiction. i met angela far away from the desert, the shoes from the desert. and that's one of things that come you know, i fell for immediately about her, the fact that she was a desert girl, eight western girl with a w., from new mexico, from albuquerque, south valley. and we ended up living in new mexico together while she was doing research for her dissertation on addiction. she is a medical anthropologist at hanford university.

we have some stanford people representing here tonight. and so i followed angela on to another landscape, northern new mexico, which i dirty scene. i'd been a couple times as a tourist when i was younger. with all of the northern new mexico, represented artistically whether it's, you know, postcard in the carousel checks to or ansel adams, georgia o'keeffe, santa fe artist colony painters, the writers, john nichols were filmed. how many westerns have we seen that the link gave us the same range? northern new mexico in particular has a very powerful draw in terms of its enchanted

landscape. the official state nickname of new mexico is land of enchantment, which carries a wisp of new age mysticism, you know, with it and makes a soft inchoate and warm and fuzzy and tends to obscure mutchler complicated reality. it is about how we imagine the desert or how hot the desert has been imagined for us as an artistic representation that is created crow imagery. they are consumed, bought and sold, the stage upon which real estate is sold in hotels and staying at hotels. and how complicated the actual human geography of the place is. as you imagine there's a place and i still that place. so i'm going to take you to northern new mexico briefly

here. angela chose northern new mexico. she's from central new mexico albuquerque. both of our families have issues with addiction. i think that was another point of encounter between us. but she chose northern new mexico i think should not be right next door to her family, you know, but close enough so that we can visit often. and also because northern new mexico is a place called the espanola valley, which runs along highway 68, which ultimately comes out of santa fe and goes to taoist. so if you separate your friend from santa fe to taoist, you've driven the road. i'm not place has the highest rate of heroin addiction and

death from overdose of heroin up anywhere in the country. and house for a long time. probably not getting better, it is getting worse. so we arrived in northern new mexico and is a participant observer, detox clinic and i'm kind of along for the ride. and even though i knew what angela's work was of the darkness of that come comes scariness of it from a danger somehow wasn't really registering for me when we arrived in that landscape. he's thinking about his cabin. and how it's going to be like dh lawrence, writing my books in the shadow of the church's peaks, 13,000-foot peaks. shortly after we arrived this is that we encountered.

get the fuck out of here come the sunday afternoon for the past hour, screaming and crying and the fist pounding on a car hood, screen doors slamming and in the midst of the battle, the voice of a small boy talking to himself and to make the leap game. didn't i say that once? are out of here. these are my neighbors. rose garcia and josé martinez, a couple both 23 are sold. their boys perhaps five. she has white skin with ultimate vicarious as she teases up in front come out old-school chicana style. she is somewhat pear-shaped in what is striking about her body is the constant tension of it. blunt as a hammer, she almost always wears t-shirts that have flip-flopped. josé martinez is short and wiry. the worst baseball caps backward

and during the summer shorts and tennis shoes. i've never seen him without his head covered. the little hair peeks out has got crewcut. i rarely hear his voice, although the courtyard somehow acts as a megaphone so that the southern end of the village can listen in on everything. it's almost always roses screams we hear. the fights occur a couple times a week. i am in the attic. i've made vibrating seats next to the window that looks out on joe ringtones trailer and the juniper hills beyond the highway. i've taken one of the old heavy doors scored in the garage and propped it up on sawhorses. but you're probably hung in one of the original bedrooms downstairs that is now my writing desk. he took my note to. she is accusing him of stealing her marijuana.

>> i didn't take your mota, bitch. i look for a angela wrightson added direct view of perez and josé. i am careful to remain in shadow, although i doubt my neighbors can see me given the angle and distance. and in any case, they are too deep in their moment to look across the courtyard and up to the tiny window of their neighbors attic. sometimes angela joins me. i kneeled by the wind and she stands. or is it in the rocking chair. she sits on the floor and researching unarmed she supports on the windowsill. we stay for as long as the fight last until he jumped into his car and drives up the clouded past. only rarely does she drive off. upon the return of start up again. muffled shouting from inside the house, a word in a phrase,

louder, closer to the front door. the door opens now coming, get the fuck out of my life. this is her most repeated line. she struck back inside again, the tories plans. now it's quiet in the courtyard and in the rest of the village. there's a late-season freeze last night that the sun has warmed the hispaniola valley. the local weather forecast growth that was going to be a chamber of commerce to. flies in the yellow green for spring. i can hear the rhythmic whir of a few cicadas. first of the year coming up from the riverside. that's the reason joe grand. the car sentra up-and-down taking target this across the highway. we are surrounded by millions of acres of land that once belonged to the ancestors of my

neighbors. and suddenly, her voice builds encrusting shriek, which usually happens on the final word of the phrase like life, taken the vow and bending at several different directions before her breath rundown, then she coughs. she coughs a lot. as your early in the morning, late at night. you're clearly when she's sitting on the patio smoking a joint. the throat clenching and tissue creating deep inside her chest. everyone's been a while, he responds, but he never shows as loudly as she does. look at you, you're psycho. they are dealing. we have noticed the traffic. perhaps a dozen cars a day trip through. these customers are men, i'll expand on his as mexican-americans can't

themselves in northern mexico, young and old, mostly in work trucks. some will come early in the morning, apparently on their way to a tradeshow, plumbing, electrical. others in the early evening, clearly after finishing work. some in the middle of the day, some in the wee hours. it's roses house. the garcias, just so happens our neighbors have the surname garcia and martinez, angela is garcia. the garcias are prominent in the area. one member of the clan owns a nightclub in the village. another the first and that's never a good with the road at the garcias, i am told, arnold connected family, so well-connected debtor landlady passed onto us the information is given by local law enforcement but she suspected that josé had stolen her lawnmower. we can't do anything to them the cops told her.

but if you want to take action on your own, shoot him, drag him into your house and make it look like self-defense against breaking and entering. get the fuck out of here, you fuck. so angela and i stopped to listen to the screens on the attic windows. the journalist in me thinks, talk to them. get close. but we already are. they are our neighbors after all. rose is aware of our presence. turn the first of the witness, which occurred a couple weeks after our arrival and acquitted rose and another, to blow from the patio, she screamed i don't need this shit, i've got new neighbors. i can imagine her calculating, perhaps even taking of us as

gringos. she never leaves the house before 10 in the morning because class can trump race of course and new mexico, race does not necessarily mean colored. plenty of his span of supreme spanish lineage back it up with light skin and eyes. third period of months after adjusting to arrival in the village where they've been in, we come to an agreement, all of us. they won't get in our shit, we will get, which means we must not feel compassion for loathing for fear. we must not feel any need for each other, but still i go to the window in the attic. when children don't come to my other neighbor and i talk across the sand, sometimes we'll discuss the latest eruption next-door. he shakes his head. show us down, but a toxic you

sold. a man of tradition. he is always reminding me that on the land all the way from the highway to the river. there were orchards and pastures, cows and sheep, goats know everyone turned to drain every summer. there were fights of course. a lot of drinking, but not cocaine and not heroin. they did below the mesa. i matter what time of year, the sun goes down an hour earlier than it does anywhere else. those exposed one last time, i can't take it anymore. now she shoots off enervate chevy suv. he stays behind the her son, putters around the yard. she returns in a few minutes, charging down the road and it

does cause she screamed some more and goes back inside the house. a true dusk, when the last of the sunlight bleeds away from the eastern hills, beyond the reach of the base a shadow, lead senate bluegray power, i hear her screams again. i walk upstairs to the window where i spent the better part of the afternoon. i can see the dome light inside has a small black sedan with tinted and does. he's sitting inside, listening to music that i can't hear. the little boy is gone. i eat dinner alone. angela is on the graveyard shift at the clinic. on turner classic movies, i watch and made to remember. johnson then, were in a precarious situation. i go to the attic, look out the back window one last time. the dome light in the sedan is off now. a thin light -- a thin line of

flight cracking at the bottom of the front door. so that's a glimpse at an early point in the narrative in the book when were adjusting to life in this village in new mexico and the hispaniola valley, which if you're driving between santa fe and taos to visit taos pueblo or see the dance on san juan pablo, the pueblo switched back to the language name while we were living there, as a matter of fact which kind appears that the fact that the conquest and resistance to it is still very much ongoing in northern new mexico and in many other places. if you are going on the road from santa fe to taos, you're going to go through and you're not going to see it.

the highway is set above the village a little bit. the catch maybe a couple 10 rooftops of the adobe is. and if you do, you'll think a quaint northern new mexican adobe village, the very picture of new mexican pastoral. you know, you render any plein air painting of the dutiful because it is beautiful. desert america argues that tourist and real estate speculation and artistic representation have come together in a rather unholy alliance that began while the conquest are american manifest destiny was still occurring. the ashes in topeka santa fe railroads, railroad that went through new mexico needed paying customers. how do they get paying customers? the ats have hired the greatest painters of the day.

women shine, moran, the founders ultimately. the canvas is that these amazing painters rendered, ended up reproduced in train stations, and of course in harper's. these dutiful landscapes, which almost always were proactive human figures. which is the natural landscape. if there is a human figure on it as they went in figure. they rarely made that -- i'm just a representation that then. these figures completely collapsed the history of conquest and needed a place that just seemed enchanted. the irony is most of the painters of the santa fe colonies would have considered

themselves in the context of their time and place, were in liberal progressive for it in radical circles. they were hanging out with people like mary austin, right? but the residue of the gauge of conquest for its way into their work. you can read it in dh lawrence. these works -- this artistic works in literature and in painting and film, the western still animate the landscape for us and hide what is behind. and the most recent boom and bust cycle, many of the old western tropes, e. and w. were redeployed to sell real estate. new subdivisions had names in spanish. you could imagine castanets.

the old western was selling the new western lands cape and once again, obscuring the class divisions in the west. ultimately the western describing here is capitalism -- american capitalism at its most extreme. it's the western version of the 199. it's the devastation of drugs and drug war. it is the devastation of our immigration policies and trudging through deserts and dying in them, even as they are pursued by mexican-americans who happen to have a border patrol uniform on going deep native americans. one of the chapters in the book looks at arizona, the reservation, which is become the locus of immigration battles in the area and you have native

american tractors working for the border patrol, tracking native americans from guatemala. don't even speak spanish. speaking native tong, encountering native americans on the side of the border on that deadly landscape. so the desert of american capitalism, it does therefore the boom that would ultimately -- the boom was a bust, even when it was at its peak was one of the arguments of the book. you can tell by the chapter i just read, i markin also, what do we do with our neighbors? kind of the question that comes up again and again in the book. if the house is on fire next door, are we called upon to do something? is that the most basic, ethical calculation they are obvious?

ansell and i talked a lot about what to do with our neighbors during the three years that we lived there. as a child involved. should we have called child protective services? should we have just called the cops and say hey, they're dealing. should we have opened our door to rose when she was crying, screaming in the courtyard? tell us what's going on. ultimately, we didn't do any of those things. we just watched. and the guilt of having just watched i think will follow me forever. so, thank you very much for coming here tonight and listening ramble on about the desert. if there's any question.

[inaudible] >> there's a microphone they'll ask you to use. >> i wanted to ask you, at the house in 29 palms. >> goodness, well. >> about 15 years ago as my life fell apart and i felt like some reason i didn't go in there for years and so it was the obvious choice to me because i felt well there. but i wanted you to explain sort of what that sign is, by the way, but i wanted to know how you feel like what is happening there with the whole palm springs renaissance, palm springs in the money sort of stuff happening. and even desert hot springs, which is like masthead world forever and now it's like spot hotel. how does that work for the people? twentynine palms is a general

plan to keep everybody out. i'm talking 29, the but could be any these places. in their interest in trying to preserve communities, their towns are dying because there's no new life coming in, so all of the desert rats take over. i wanted to know so do what you think about that. >> it sounds like you know exactly how complicated these places are. several things are occurring in thank you are your question. twentynine palms is defined by its neighbor, the marine base, the marine corps air ground combat center is the biggest employer for the entire basin. and there's a lot of marine families that lived in twentynine 29 palms. my neighbors and i lived in twentynine palms were marine. and of course that marine base is the largest training facility for the united states because

there were so the last generation had been in the desert, that has been the training facility of choice. so a lot of young men and women have gone through twentynine palms to train. so defined by the military in so many ways. it's such a fraught place. the tense marigold desert and meets a different light ratepayer because the highway north is the marine base. the highway south is joshua tree national park. [inaudible] >> i read something maybe two years ago was this article in l.a. grohl from the east coast originally, from new york. and if as hot as new cool and was telling everybody to go out, saddle up and buy stuff in coachella and india, go out

their. it's like kind of palm springs was this thing and now i want to know how you see extreme poverty versus this incredible opulence and well fed kind of new money. like i just wondered what she think. what happens when filming? do they ever meet up? >> the short answer is they do when they don't. they had a new desert bohemia. they were writing about me and the friends i was tanya at the very beginning. we were the unwitting. we had no idea. a when we arrived in the desert and they were fleeing justification in the city. and we wind up the desert because of all the ways was not in the desert also in the boom

years decided to pick up in the boom years decided to pick up in the boom years decided to pick up in the boom years decided to pick up for places to go and s. falling guys created by what? the justification model. the justification more follows paradise. its representation and i think i mentioned a little bit ago the unholy alliance unrealistic speculations. the effect of this is to distort obscure, in a violent way, native populations have been there long time and alternately displays them. so is a representational displacement, you know, if it is a goal, but will displacement. ultimately, my crew -- we were the rant, but after we arrived, the real money porting. injuries to tell, anybody? art in america levels, you know, artists. and when she arrived, then joni

mitchell is looking for a place and bob dylan's people as scatting. i mean, it was a tornado, a whirlwind of speculation, driving up to people who were ranked teams, driving their vent and tempting the old families to tsaile and just cash in. so it was incredibly destabilizing force. arguments on different sides to make here. you yourself just said to resist that change, isn't it just like killing itself? is not just going to die off? another chap to your, a dying town, the population is decreasing. arrived in saved it. but it also created nature medicine powerful as in terms of race and class. i wasn't ultimately a solution i would argue. the thank you for the question.

>> i like to know how you would envision northern new mexico. but that wasn't so much based on outside of revenue error depicting it as a buffalo hunters, let's say the revenue was from a nuclear bomb factory in northern new mexico is set up to raise them. what would it be like in your vision? >> well, los alamos national labs are ratepayer and so we have that actually on that landscape already and it's the biggest employer in that area, besides wal-mart. soviet uranium mining further north on navajo land, native lands. so native lance andy spano plans that have been in his spano families for generations are compromised by all of these factors on the landscape,

beginning with real estate speculation of the santa fe rain and the dismantling of the old land grants, the marginalization of the native pueblos. the casino economy has changed the economic character of the native populations in the area in recent years. but we also hear stories about the social cost of what the casino economy does to local populations. there is more and more talk about legacy to her son or postmodern tourism. tourism with a conscience, historical to raise them coming in now, where all the effort of the fantastic wave of new western n., w. come historians, writers and artists, we have a whole generation now of new western division of these

images. and angela and i visited one of our old friends the northern new mexico and actually said something that gave me a vision of northern new mexico, which was totally the future on its head for us. we asked, so how are the pub was doing? he said you know, they're doing pretty good. discover they should just everybody. you notice the time he said, they're going to run this place in the future. i think the future of the southwest, he said, is native, that they're going to be alternately the motor of the promotion of culture and history. i don't know if that's the case, but it was a stirring vision, you know? to have -- to represent this place from the native point of view, would turn the western upside down. would be called the western anymore. we have to come up with a different name, just like sam juan pablo when we were there, changed its name to okay a

weekday in the native language. so history of the southwest is lived, it's in our bodies, and is now and there is -- i don't want to leave you with a completely dark impression. i realize that the excerpts that i read is very, very dark and it homes sometimes about reading it, but ultimately what i'm trying to do is present a situation in which finally we can upon intimately and ask yourselves, while if it's just the way it's going to be or are we going to change a? to accept the wind and 99 or do we challenge at? appear. >> so what do you think are the reasons that drive people to drug addiction?

is that boredom? and what are the mechanisms with which it is brought in the intersection between crystal mast and hair went and are those the only two drugs used? what dynamics do you think drive that other than say unemployment were boredom or frustration in your opinion and experience. >> thanks. it is of the way u. s. a question you when you have yourself. i should have referred the question to the dr. of medical anthropology in the audience, my wife, angela garcia, and they do recommender book, which was published before my book. she beat me. but what is -- if you look on amazon right now, if you look at this book, you know how they say if you liked this book coming back like this either the, we

are a couple even not amazon. the books are together. so i recommend it. so i'll borrow from angela's work. she said she addiction in that area in particular any historical context. vietnam veteran coming back with addiction in sowing the seeds in a place -- in the space of dispossession. i was able to interview people in northern new mexico who grew up without electricity, but didn't grow up poor. they grew up on a lan in the economy. as a tough life. it was a hard life, but it was clean in every sense of the word. i think spiritually and physically. purchase some vestiges of that life. but by the late 60s and 70s,

grazing has been cut at the the land grants have been dismantled by real estate speculation. oftentimes people within the grant itself selling out to outside bidders. so the dismantling of the old economy, drugs coming and in the coup de grace as drug markets exploded in the united states, which coincides with the war on drugs, which tells us how long the war on drugs has been. the more we reached the war, the greater the problem of drugs. the more we militaristic, the greater the rate of addiction, the more drugs across the border. heartier cecelia, the mexican poet and later peace movement in mexico is on a kerry fan but united states pointing this out to us. the coup de grace is the

northern new mexico assigned what is and you'll still see signs for, to assign to point out is the commuter rail gynecological days from mexico city, going north and trade dress all the way up and handed it hispaniola. well, the trade routes today is from the poppies fields of chihuahua to addiction in northern new mexico. it is a cocktail -- all these different things altogether is a cocktail in which of course there's going to be addiction they are. ultimately, angela also argues psychological, depression, accompanying all this dispossession in the signature forebears had and what identity to your left if you don't have the land itself. and that is ultimately one of the most painful ironies is for the native population in this area to look at their landscape,

represented by outsiders. by the way, i am not claiming status here. i am also an outsider. i'm trained to perform it economy outside gate, but ultimately i'm an outsider to i know there's going to be a lot to say, came here for a couple years and he thinks is an expert on us and is representing us yet another outsider. donald native dialect tic says everything about the history of conquest and possession itself. and briefly other drugs. there's more and more prescription drugs used in overdose. as an epidemic. mostly native american reservations. so it's generalized. you're the wildfires raging

right now throughout the southwest, historic wildfires? the same thing is happening in terms of drugs. >> do in a way for the microphone. >> do you go into how you got clean and sober in the book? or is that a separate topic. >> i was just answering a question about this from a journalist. the book tries to be part memoir, part reportage or as a reportage. known. i always use reportage because french and spanish. but part reportage, part memoir. and in trying to balance those three, the editor at metropolitan books, she

stands -- she pushed me to cut back on the memoir more and more. sometimes i resisted. sometimes i went to the max on a couple things that i kept in the book does she really wanted to cut. the drug narrative is very circumspect, but it comes as a through line to the boat. but the end of the book i don't say that i'm clean. according to aaa today and not clean and sober. you know, here's a glass of wine and i smoked marijuana. but i'm not using cocaine right now. that was the issue that led me to the desert. so that process is alluded to, but it's not prescript did. you know what i'm saying? i'm not using it -- it's not in a million little pieces. and i tell the truth here, too.

in the back. >> this is just kind of a random question, but are you still trying to research this topic? three this company mr. best? party during next? >> thanks. now, the desert is immense and eternal and i am totally hooked. and the book i talk about how coming out my grand parents, my mexican grandparents came from desert lands. my childhood we went to the desert a lot. i came back to it as an adult. i was weaned on the western w., western music from the soundtrack of my childhood was marty robinson freddy fender. you know, i am a western cape, totally been aware of how i mike

on tuesday not to the lone ranger. by the way, we just rented to johnny depp shoot in the the lone ranger in northern mexico. i assume he signed onto a new western representations and that it fuel-efficient somehow. we will see. we will track him on not. so yeah, i'm a total desert rat. i'm a caffeine out in the reserve a month ago by myself. i don't do that very often because when the sun sets and i'm out there by myself, i'd go crazy paranoid, man. it is scary out there. you know, the early christian monastic scum of the first century desert gnostics come in the christian mistakes, they would rightly expand and to me, they would write his narratives about how they go out -- they called themselves, case by themselves and they would feel

themselves then. and they said these horrible demons but assault them and creatures that can have and these crazy and has the rhetorical visions. and i struck up a close friendship with the theologian worry teich, doug christie has expert pieces on the first century. and i asked him, you know, i was so paranoid. not mine in for a zombie was going to come out from behind the boulder and bash my head at what the rock. is that the same thing the christian mystics were feeling? is alike hardwired in a somehow? he said totally. like that paranoia is both contact with radical otherness for city boys on the one hand, but it's also something embedded, kind of like when you're in the wilderness is hardwired in us. there are snakes out there and i don't like snakes.

so, but then of course i settled in for the night and did my little centering prayer thing and ultimately, there'd been a little bit of cloud cover. the stars came out. i mean, this is on the road to death valley, which is the strongest sky on the mainland. okay? and when the stars came out i just looked up into that, saw god's face and i went to a very peaceful sleep and that's -- that is the desert, too. so yeah, i'm going to be going. [speaking in spanish] maybe. me out there. >> other questions? >> this is excellent conversation, just hearing you talk in your new read and look

at your book briefly. i am of course interested in knowing the representation of the desert and the way you write about language and multiple varieties that i have seen in your performance as well as in the text and how you -- what are you doing with that? how are you choosing to represent that? the kind of thought to get to that? we might have one particular representation, do you seem to be weaving so much and i wonder what kind of thought you're giving to that. >> sure. i mean, the language i just gave to my description, you know, kind of. and announce apple there are call, you know, romantic sublime, you know, the early part of the writing was very organic, poor and the words on the page, journals, interviews. you know, the early part of the

process. once i knew the material i had, i became conscious of the three elements. the memoir, reportage and then i'm just ultimately i wanted to keep the reader moving back and forth across borders, discursively and all the tools we have as writers in terms of conjuring imagery and playing off of a stereotype. and i wanted the reader to never settle in to match into one particular point of view because the west is just a kaleidoscope, which can be a sublime or violet wand. oftentimes simultaneously. so they just keep mixing it up. and i forced myself as a writer to try to occupy it the point of view as the other as often

affected. radical environmentalists. new age mystics. and then, the people i have more sympathy with, you know, ultimately and just suppose those can create tension between those representations. and also thinking a lot about how to render landscape and how to render the human form upon the landscape he kasai was always thinking about the painters, vasili painters of the colonies coming to your colonies in the way the western represents people, john ford and more recently, people like paul thomas andersen, there will be blood, which i think is probably the best western of our generation. and early on, and literary terms, i set myself a poet writing against because i just think it's a reactionary old fire it. they think it's totally over

iraq. and everybody ghosties the borderland. come on, give me a break. but ultimately, i've realized he has the borderlands. he's incredibly powerful. you know? those representations are to be dealt with. i was jumping my sword at a windmill. you know, ultimately grudging respect to the borderlands and i even ripped off one of his stylistic tricks, which i think is a progressive, wonderful thing that he does in his novel, the border trilogy he does italicize spanish. you know? exactly, thank you. she raises the border between english and spanish and renders a truly weird or representation of the way languages coexist there. it is a wonderful thing he did there. i'm sure there was a chicana

writer that did this before him that will forever remain nameless, you know, but he popularized it endicott new york -- i had to kind of fight for that. but by the time is making the argument in "new york times" is looking into it. so ultimately, you know, i can't talk that bad. >> what sick with some controversy here tonight. looks like we have time for maybe two more questions. >> do you think they'll talk about before like the public and the commerce for them, and maybe a savior and summits of? t. think that they would then be sorted and anterior, a little bit now, but a civil war, and a sense? i mean, like the casino native americans kind of saved their

people because it poured money into the communities there. but then it sort of got out of control. and you know like in animal farm, like the casino indians are kind of separate now. they are like white men with his assistant staff. t. think there could become enough of a movement respect for those places? you know, for the balance of power? >> yes, absolutely. sure, anything is possible. i believe that the miracles can happen. i believe change can come. i often argue a lot in my own family. we have a lot of different political points of view of one of the earliest arguments i had was my grandfather in el salvador during the civil war was he said, this is just the way it is. there's rich people and poor people and it's always going to

be that way. tonight a young man come to believe in the revolution said no, we can change this. and guess what? in charge of el salvador today. not the death squads of the right wing reaganites. so yes, of course it's possible and there is progress is being have come out at the casino economy and social classes that come out of the casino company and it's a complicated terrain that is not the purview of this book. i had additions to read more about the pueblo situation. they were our neighbors. we were living within a couple miles, but ultimately, right now the pueblos don't want to be represented by outsiders and they put up a wall. and if i was on the land and have been dealing with 500 years

of that representations are misrepresentations of my people, i would probably do the same thing. but thank you. >> somebody else? >> i just wonder if you have any kind of regional reaction to the book. i grew up here, but i've lived in the east for 30 years and it is only when i moved to the east i realize how far the west was the way. this is a different bias. there's been some shows in washington and his paintings are talking about a major controversial show attacks and things on it. has its own controversies in the interesting. it's hardly the west, you know, but it's closer. just wondering if you have a different reactions in different areas. >> well, we are west of the west here. like you're saying, los angeles is and isn't the last.

so you know, talking about this in l.a. is different than talking about in new mexico are reading this and in santa fe, reading before her very well-heeled audience that has its neighbors right next-door. these are the neighbors next door. so they had surveillance to read this. i think the west dallas and cancer as a canvas upon which the country can look at itself. what i'm trying to argue here is the most recent boom and bust and the terrible price that was paid and are still paying was at its most radical and violent in the last. phoenix, san bernardino, denver. but have been there in terms of the