me and for coming out tonight. as the fog rolled in, my partner and i, we saw as we were making our way west, west into the fog. ..

at its heart with several doctors, but ultimately just a title is boom and bust in the new old west, so i'm looking at the way the economy affects our lives, the way the economy gets into her very bodies. it is a book that i wrote because my body arrived in the desert under very particular circumstances in the winter of 1997 when i was broke, broke and and on drugs. i was in mexico city, where i had been lucky enough to go under a book contract from new york. i got it to us from new york

publisher to write a book which was a dream come true. and in mexico city by 1997 i had crossed the deadline and didn't have a word written and i was roque. i called the only friend i could count on at that point because i lifestyle had led to destroy a lot of personal relationships. i called my friend come a performance artistho are met through the solidarity network. art and politics back in the 1980s. and i said, eddie, [speaking in spanish] she happened to be living under joshua t., california at that particular time. as a whole set of circumstances that led her -- she's from the tropics of central america. how did she wind up in the desert? everybody has a story in the desert about how they got there.

she said [speaking in spanish] will take care of you. we'll give you a priest he lives. i arrived in the desert in one of the first things i saw when i rented my little shack out in the sand next to a sign that said services 100 miles, the town of twentynine palms easter joshua tree, i felt myself driven to go further and further out. they were in the village of joshua tree, which is read at the edge of a beautiful national park. you guys are joshua tree, red? you know u2's album at least. you know a joshua tree looks like. crazy arms going this way i'm not. i wanted to go further out. there was something existential that is driving me further and further out into the net income of the big empty as they say about the desert and also because the further out you

might cover the rest got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. so it's been $275 a month for a two bedroom house with five acres of land on the edge of twentynine palms riper@z 100 miles. and that is where this book he gives. it begins with a personal crisis and arriving -- ultimately the desert has been the site of restorative pilgrimage for the millennia and at that particular moment i don't think i was aware of what i was doing. i didn't say to myself, i am big shovel with my life. i must go scheel in the desert, but ultimately that is the space at a century and later on i realized that all the symbolism was there to receive name and began the process of healing and

getting to know this place, which included almost immediately in 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 meth was the devastating landscape and where 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, is also entering a place that was the opposite of that, a phantasmagorical plays. many years after i moved to

joshua tree and twentynine palms, just a few years later i met my partner, angela garcia who happens to be sitting in the audience tonight and has also written a wonderful book in many ways about the desert called the pastoral clinic about addiction. i met angela far away from the desert, but she is from the desert. that is one of the things i fell for immediately about her, the fact that she was a desert girl, a western girl with a capital w., from new mexico, albuquerque in the south valley. we ended up living in new mexico to get there while she was doing research for her dissertation on addiction. she's a medical anthropologist. we have some stanford people wrecking unshed representing here tonight. i followed angela on to another landscape, northern new mexico,

which i had dirty scene. i'd been a couple times as a tourist when i was younger. but with all of the northern mexico represented artistically, whether it's as a little postcard in the carousel at a truck stop or ansel adams, georgia o'keeffe, the santa fe artist colony painters, the writers, john nichols were found. how many westerns have we seen that had basin and range? northern new mexico in particular have a very powerful draw in terms of its enchanted landscape indeed. the official state nickname of new mexico is the land of enchantment, which carries a whiff of new age mysticism with

it and makes it soft and globally and more manifestly intent to have skewered much more complicated reality and ultimately that is the desert america is about. it is about how we imagine the desert or how the desert has been imagined for a by the many artistic representations that have created this cruel imagery, this vision of the desert or a pet is consumed, that is bought and sold, and that is the stage upon which real estate is old and hotels and statement hotels and tourist packages, et cetera and how complicated the actual human geography of the place is. it's the imagined place honors the lives place. so i'm going to take you to northern new mexico briefly here angela chose northern new mexico. she is from central new mexico,

albuquerque. oath 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 not to be right next door to her family, but close enough so we could visit often. and also because the northern new mexico there's a place called the espanola ballot that runs along highway 68, which ultimately comes out of santa fe investor talus. so if you are to be espanola valley is called the low road in taos. i'm not place in northern mexico has the highest rate of heroin addiction and the problem is not getting better. it's 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 about a minute the darkness of it come to, danger of it, somehow it wasn't really registering for me when we arrived on that landscape. i was thinking that dh lawrence kaplan about talus and how it's going to be like dh lawrence, like writing my books coming and no, in the shadow of the churches peaks,, 13,000-foot peaks. shortly after we arrived, this is what we encountered. get the fuck out of here. sunday afternoon, for the past hour from the screaming and crying, fist pounding on a car

to come the screen door slamming them in the midst of the battle, the voice of a small boy talking to himself in and make believe game. i said i want you out of here. these are my neighbors. rose garcia and josé martinez, a couple both 22 years old. her voice perhaps five. she's light-skinned with long thick black hair that she teases in front, old-school chicana style. she is somewhat pear-shaped and what is striking about her body is the constant tension of it. every post tents and blunt as a hammer. she almost always wears t-shirts and hanson put it. josé martinez is short and wiry. he wears his baseball caps backward, triple excised by t-shirts and during the summer, shorts and tennis shoes. i've never seen him without his hat covered with little hair peeks out is cut very close,

crewcut. i rarely hear his voice even though the courtyard of the house somehow acts as a megaphone so 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 my writing space next to the window that looks out on job windows trailer and juniper hills be on the highway. i've taken one of the old heavy doors stored in the and prompted up unsought horses. the door hung around at the original bedrooms downstairs is now my writing desk. you took my mota. she's accusing him of stealing her marijuana. i didn't take your mozart, bitch. when i hear the screams i had shut for angela wright and where i have a direct view of rows and

josé's. i'm careful to remain in the shadow of though i doubt my neighbors can see me come even angle and distance. in any case, they are too deep in their moment to look across the courtyard to the tiny window of their neighbors attic. sometimes angela joins me. i kneel by the window and she stands. or i said in a rocking chair and she sits on the floor and rests her chin on an arm she supports on the one assail. we stay for as long as the site last until he jumps into his car and drives off in a cloud of dust. only rarely did she drive off. upon his return it'll start up again. muffled shouting from inside the house, a word, that phrase, louder, closer to the front door. the door opens now coming, get the fuck out of my life. this is her most opt repeated

line. she stressed back inside again, the door slams. now it's quiet in the courtyard and in the rest of the village. there is a late-season freeze last night, but the sun has one of the annual valley. the local weather forecaster wrote that he was going to be a chamber of commerce day, flies buzzed lazily of the gumbo and green and blue spring. i can hear the rhythmic of a few cicadas the first of the year coming up from the riverside. that's the rio grande. the wish of cars and trucks up and down the highway, the distant adding of locals taking target practice in the blm highway. we are surrounded and millions of acres of public land that once belonged to the ancestors of my neighbors. and suddenly, go to that little punta of yours.

the shriek usually happens in the final word of a phrase like life, taking the and bending at several different directions before her breath runs out amid she coughs. she coughs a lot. i hear it early in the morning, late at night. i hear very clearly when she's sitting on the patio smoking a joint. it is big and sharp, tissue creating deep inside her chest. every once in a while he was on, but he never shouts as lovely as she does. look at you, you're seko. they are dealing. we've noticed the traffic. perhaps a dozen cars at a drive-through. these customers are men, all this spam as, as mexican americans call themselves, young and old, mostly in work charts. some will come early in the morning, apparently on their way to a trade job, plumbing,

electrical. others in the early evening, clearly after finishing work. some in the middle of the day, some in the wee hours. the garcia is it just so happens that her neighbors had a last name from the surnames and martinez. the garcia said prominent in the area. one member of the clan owns a nightclub in the village. another of the first and it's never open at the intersection of the highway with the road. the garcia is, i am told, are as old connected family, so well-connected that our landlady passed on to list the advice she was given by law enforcement but she suspected 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 them in your house and make it look like self-defense against breaking and entering.

get the fuck out of. you fuck. junior bills. look in the mirror. so angela and i watch and listen to the screen on the attic windows. the journalist in me thinks, talk to them. get close. but we rtr. they are our neighbors after all. rose is aware of our presence. during the first day we went disc of which occurred a couple weeks after arrival and included rose and another woman coming to on the patio, she screamed, i don't need this shit. i've got new neighbors. perhaps thinking us gringos she drives a subaru. never leaves the house before 10:00 in the morning because class can trump race, of course.

and in new mexico, race does not necessarily mean color. plenty of hispanics claim spanish lineage back it up with light skin and eyes. so over a period of months of adjusting to our arrival in the village were living in, we come to an agreement, all of us. they won't hit and are shit and we won't get emmaus, which means we must not feel compassion or loathing or fear. we must not feel anything for each other. but still, i go to the window in the attic. when children don't, my other neighbor and i talk across the fence, sometimes we'll discuss the latest eruption next story. he shakes his head. show is young, but a toxic assault. a man is tradition, he's been a tradition. he's always reminded me that own the land from the highway to the

river. they were orchards impostures he said. good snow every winter and good rain every summer. there were fights of course. a lot of drinking, but not cocaine and not heroin mass for sure. now look at us. the sun dips below the black mesa, bringing the early twilight. no matter what time of year it is, the sun goes down in our earlier than it does anywhere else. we are right in the shadow of it. rose explodes one last time. i can't take it anymore. now she shoots off at her red chevy suv. he stays behind with their son, putters around the yard. she returns in a few minutes, charging down the road in a dust cloud. she screamed some more in his back inside the house. at dusk when the last of the sunlight leads away from the eastern hills, beyond the reach

of the mesa shadow, of the senate blue, great 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 was a small black city and with the tinted windows. 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 a night to remember. gentlemen, we're in a precarious situation. i go to the attic to write. i look out the back window one last time. the dome light in the city and is now. a thin light -- a thin line of light seeps through the crack at the bottom of the front door. so that the clumps at an early

point in the narrative in the book when we are adjusting to life in this village in new mexico in the espinola valley. which if you are driving between santa fe and taos, if you drive from santa fe to taoist to visit taos pueblo or see the turtle dance on new year's day at san juan pueblo, the pueblo switched back to the language name, while we were living there as a matter of fact, which bears to the fact that the conquest of the resistance to it is still very much ongoing and northern new mexico in many other places. if you are going on the road from santa fe to taoist, you're going to go right through velarde and you're not in aca. the highway is set above the village. you'll catch maybe a couple 10 rooftops of the adobes and if you do, you'll think a quaint

northern new mexican adobe village, the very picture of new mexican pastoral, you know, you could render it in a planar painting it with the beautiful because it is beautiful. desert america argues that to raise some and real estate speculation and artistic representation have come together in a rather unholy alliance that began while the conquest, our american manifest destiny conquest was still occurring. the ashes and come in topeka and santa fe railroad, a railroad that went through the mexico needed paying customers. how do we get paying customers in the ats have? hired the greatest painters of the day. blumenstein, moran, the founders of the taos colony ultimately. the canvases that these amazing

painters rendered ended up reproduced in train station in the chorus, harpers, the beautiful landscapes which almost always were bereft of human figures. just the natural landscape. it was a wednesday and nader. hispano is rarely made representation back then. the figures completely collapsed, the history of conquest and needed a place that seemed more enchanted. the irony is that most of the painters of santa fe and taos would consider themselves in the context of their time and place were as liberal, progressive or radical circles. they were hanging out people

like mary mary austin, ray? that the residue of the conquest worked its way into their work. he could read it and dh lawrence. these works, these artistic works of literature and painting and film, the western is still animate that landscape for us and hide what is behind that screen. in the most recent boom and bust cycle come in many of the old western troops, old west, and o. w. were redeployed to sell real estate. new subdivision had names in spanish, enchanted because he imagine a flamenco dancer or castanet telling you to set division. the old western was selling the new western landscape and once

again, obscuring the class divisions in the west. ultimately the west i am describing here is capitalism, american capitalism at its most extreme. it is the western version of the 199. it's the devastation of drugs and the drug war. it's the immigration policies and migrants trudging through deserts and dying in them, even if they are pursued mexican-americans who happened to every border border patrol uniform on or indeed native americans. one of the chapters in the book looks at arizona, the ottoman reservation has come the locus of immigration battles in the area and you have native american tractors or can for the border patrol, tracking negative americans from guatemala, don't even speak spanish.

speaking their native, millinery tom, in countering native americans on the side of the border on that deadly landscape. so the desert of american capitalism, a desert of the boom the boom was a biased come even when it was added peak was one of the arguments in the book. if you can tell from the chat or i just read, i also, what can we do with their neighbors? it's a 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? isn't the most basic, ethical calculation they are obvious? angela and i talked a lot about what to do with our neighbors during the three years we lived

there. there is a child involved. should we have called child protective services? reported them? should we have called the cops and say hey, they're dealing. should we have opened our door to rose when she was crying, screaming in the cart. come one come over and 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 to me ramble on about the desert. if there's any questions or comments, please. [inaudible] >> there's a microphone they're going to ask you to use. >> all yell at. >> you need to use the mic.

>> i wanted to ask -- i have a house in twentynine palms and i bought it 15 years ago as a gesture of my life sort of fell apart and i felt like some reason i've been going there for years, so it was the obvious choice to me because i felt well there. i want you to explain -- i want to know what the sign is, by the way, but i want to know how you view liquidates had any name with the whole palm springs renaissance and the money sort of stuff happening. and even desert hot springs, which is like a meth head and now his leg -- like how did it work for the people? twentynine palms has a general plan to keep everybody out. i'm talking about 29, curt could be any these places. in trying to their communities, there is no new life coming in,

so i just wanted to know what you think about all that. >> it sounds like you know exactly how complicated these places are. several things are occurring. thank you for your question. 29 homes is defined by its neighbor or, the marine base, the marine corps air combat center is the biggest employer for the entire morocco the same and there's a lot of marine families that lived in twentynine palms. my neighbors when i lived in twentynine palms where marines. and of course that green bay's is the largest training facility for the marines in the united states and because our wars of the last generation have been in the desert, that is the training is a good choice.

so a lot of young men and women have gone through 29 homes to train. so what is defined by the military in so many ways. it is such a fraught place for the 10 spec oracle desert in the supply desert meet in a fault line right there in because the highway north is the marine base. the highway south is joshua tree national park. [inaudible] >> i read something a few years ago, like maybe three years ago there was an article in outlay. it says hot is the new cool canoeist telling everybody to go out and saddle up and buy stuff in coachella and india and go live out there. it's like kind of palm springs with this being and i want to know how you see extreme poverty and dysfunction verses like this

incredible opulence and while some kind of new money. like i just wondered what you think. like what happens -- do they ever meet up? >> the short answer is they do and they don't. i know the article yore talking about. "the los angeles times" had a spread called new desert emea. they were writing about me and the friends i was telling you at the very beginning. we were the unwitting. we had no idea. all we knew when we arrived in the desert of a set his chief abu are creative types that were fleeing justification in the city. and we wind up in the desert. because of all the ways we've imagine the desert also. and the boom years are starting to pick up in capitalist looking for places to go when capital is following god is and does is by what? i don't mean to tell you all in

san francisco. it follows the typical representation. i think i mentioned a little bit ago the unholy alliance and realistic expectation. the effect of this is to distort a skewer and a violent way, native populations who have been there for a long time and ultimately displace them. it's a representational displacement and it's a physical, literal displacement. ultimately, my crew, we've are low rents, but after we arrived, the real money poured in. andrea's et al., anybody? andrus to tell his arts america level artist and when she arrived, then joni mitchell was looking for a place in bob dylan and these people were out scouting. it is a tornado, a whirlwind of

speculation, driving up the people who were renting, driving up their friends and the people attempting, the old families to salinger's cash in. so it was an early destabilizing force. you yourself just said, what if the town resist that kind of change come is in at killing it off? isn't going to die off? is another chapter here. as a dying town, population decreasing. he arrived in same day, but it also created a tremendously powerful schisms in terms of race and class so i wasn't ultimately a solution i would argue. but thank you for your question. >> i would like to know how you would envision northern new mexico if it wasn't so much based on outsider revenue to pick the natives as buffalo

hunters. thus did the revenue was from a nuclear bomb factory -- >> like los alamos. >> what would it be like in your vision? >> welcome the los alamos national labs are right there. so we have that actually on that landscape already and it's the biggest employer in that area besides wal-mart. we have uranium mining for the north and navajo land, so native lands and a spinner lands that have been in his span of families for 12 generations some cases are compromised by all these factors on the landscape, beginning with the real estate speculation of the santa fe rain and the dismantling of the old land grants, the marginalization of the native populace. 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 economy does to local populations. there is more and more talk about legacy to a summer postmodern tourism, tourism at the conscience, historical tourism coming in now, worldly affairs of the fantastic wave of new western -- new western, capital and, w., historians, writers and artists -- we have a whole generation now a new western revision of these images and angela and i visited with one of our old friends in northern new mexico and he actually said some indicating the addition of northern new mexico, which was totally turned

to feature on its head for us. we asked, so how's the public during? he said you know, it's doing pretty good. he sent his span of five pieces are doing pretty good. you know what i think he said anything about misplaced in the future. i think the future of the southwest he said is native, that they're going to be ultimately at 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 coming in no, from the native point of view would turn the western upside down. it wouldn't be called the western anymore. we'd have to come up with a different name, just like sam juan pablo when we were there, changed its name to okay opening-day in the native language. so history in the southwest is lived, it's in our bodies, it is

now and there is -- i don't want to leave you with a completely dark impression. i realize that the excerpt that i read is very, very dark and i have qualms sometimes about reading it. but ultimately what i'm trying to do is present the situation in which finally we can upon the other intimately and ask ourselves, well, it is this the way it's going to be are we going to change it? to accept the 199 where do we challenge it? >> what do you think -- so what do you think are the reasons that drive people to drug addiction? is the word i'm? and what other mechanisms that heroin is bought and what is the intersection between crystal

meth and heroin and what dynamics do you think other than unemployment or boredom or frustration in your opinion and ask various? >> thinks. because of the way u.s. at questioning sure you have plenty ideas yourself. i showed referred the question to the dr. of medical anthropology in the audience. my wife angela, garcia wrote an entire book on it. i do recommend her book, which was published before my book. she beat me. to it. but if you look on amazon right now, if you look up this book coming out how this if you like this book, you might like the other book? were a couple even on amazon. so the books are together. so i recommend it. so i'll borrow from angela's work. she said she heroin addiction

and in historical context. vietnam veteran coming back with addiction and so in the seats in a place -- and a space of dispossession. i was able to interview people in northern new mexico from hispanics who grew up without electricity, they didn't grow up poor. they grew up on a land-based economy. it was a tough life, a hard life, but he was clean in every sense of the word. i think spiritually and physically. there are still some vestiges of that life, but by the late 60s and 70s, grazing allotments have been cut back. the land grants have been dismantled by real estate speculation. oftentimes people within the grand itself to outside bidders.

so the dismantling of the old world economy, drugs coming in and 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 wish the war, the greater the problem of drugs. the more we militarize that come in the greater the rate of addiction, the more drugs across the board. five years cecilia, the mexican leader of the peace in the rent in new mexico sonicare van right now press the united states pointing this out to us. the coup de grace is that northern new mexico is, you still see signs for it point out it was the camino real during the colonial days for mexico

city, going north to trade route all the way up. and it ended in espanola. that was an historic traitor. well, that trade route today is from the poppies fields of chihuahua to heroin addiction in northern new mexico. it's a cocktail -- all these different things altogether is a cocktail and which of course there's going to be a dictionary. ultimately angela argues sociological depression accompanying all the dispossession embassy which are forebears had and what identity do you have left if you don't have the land itself? and that is ultimately i think one of the most painful irony is it's for the native population in this area to look at their landscape represented as outsiders. and by the way, i'm not claiming indigenous status here. i am also an outsider.

i'm trying to hide a critique on the outside but ultimately i'm an outsider. i know many will say ruben martinez came here for a couple years and he said galactic that says everything about the history of conquest and possession itself. and briefly, other drugs, there's more and more prescription drug abuse an overdose. it's an epidemic could message in the area, mostly on a native american reservation and cocaine. so you know the wildfires that are raging right now throughout the southwest? historic wildfires? the same thing is happening in terms of drugs.

>> you go into how you got clean and sober in the book or is that a separate topic? i was just answering questions about this from a journalist. the book tries to be part memoir, part reportage -- or was it reportage. i've never known. i always use reportage because french and spanish. part reportage, part memoir. and in trying to balance those three, my editor at metropolitan books, she tends -- she pushed me to cut back on the memoir more and more. sometimes i went to the map on a couple of i went the book.

the drug narrative is very circumspect, but it comes through the book good by the end of the book i don't say that i'm clean. according to aaa today are not clean and sober. i have an occasional glass of wine and i smoke marijuana, but i'm not using right now and that was the issue that ultimately led me to the desert i think. but that particular personal process is alluded to, but it is not prescriptive. 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? or are you done with this and putting it to rest? what are you doing next? >> banks. now, the desert is immense and eternal i'm totally hooked. in the book i talk about how, you know, my grandparents come on a 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 and western music on the soundtrack of my childhood was marty robbins and freddie found her, you know, i am the western cape, w., totally being aware of tonto, saying that to the lone ranger. either way, we just ran into johnny depp in northern new mexico.

i assume he signed on to a new western representation of the lone ranger and that's a revision somehow. will track him on that. so yeah, i'm a total desert rat. i like camping out in the mojave national preserve about a month ago by myself. i don't do that very often because when the sun had set and altered by myself, i go crazy paranoid, man. it is scary out there. you know, the early christian monastics, the four century desert monastic scum of the christian mistakes would write like saint anthony would write these narratives about how they go out, these caves by themselves and they would steal themselves and then they say these horrible demons, creatures with 10 had in these crazy phantasmagorical visions. and it struck up a very close

vision where i teach doug christie expertise on the four century. i asked him what i came back from the trip i said i was so paranoid that some out mayan or zombie was going to come out from behind a boulder and bash my head in with a rock. is that the same thing the christian mystics were feeling? he said totally. like that's paranoia is both contact with city boy on the one hand, but it's also some thing that is embedded, kind of like when you're in the wilderness is hardwired in us because there are snakes out there and i don't like snakes. but then of course i settled in for the night and did my little

centering prayer thing and ultimately when the sky cleared a little bit, very bad little bit of cloud cover, the stars came out. i mean, this is on the road to death valley, which is the starry sky on the mainland. when the stars came out, i just looked up into that. i saw god stays and i went into a very peaceful sleep and that, you know, that is the desert, too. [speaking in spanish] may bayberry mia her. >> sammy. >> this is an excellent conversation. just hearing you talk and read and having the chance to literature both briefly, i am of course interested in local estate representation of the desert and the way you write and read about language and the multiple varieties that i have

seen in your performance as well as in the tax and what you're doing with that or how are you choosing to represent? were kind of thought do you get to that? ordinarily thinking about the western might have representation. you seem to be leaving so much and i wonder what kind of thought you're giving to that. >> scheuer. i mean, the language i just gave to my description, you know, kind of eerie and an out of lyrical, romantic sublime r. i mean, the early part of the writing was very organic, pour in the words on the page, journals, interviews, you know, the early part of the process. the one thing that the material i had come i became conscious of the three elements, the memoir, reportage and criticism. and just ultimately i wanted to

keep the reader going back and forth across the borders, discursively and all the tools we have as writers in terms of common shooting injury and playing off of a stereotype, archetype. and i wanted the reader to never settle in to much into one particular point of view because the west, it's the kaleidoscope, which can be a sublime or violet wand, oftentimes simultaneously. so they just keep mixing it up. and i force myself as a writer to try to occupy the point of view of the other as often as i possibly could. radical environmentalists, new age mistakes and bad people that i have more sympathy with, ultimately just oppose those

educrat representations. and also thinking a lot about how to vendor landscape and how to render the human form upon the landscape because i was always thinking about the painters come in the early painters colonies in the way the western represents people in the landscape. john ford and more recently people like paul thomas andersen. you know, there will be blood. i think it's probably the best western of our generation. and early on in truly literary terms i set myself the goal against mccarthy because i just think he's a reactionary old fire. and i think it perp went totally over what. and everybody goes come on, give me a break. ultimately i realized, he is the

father of the borderland. he's incredibly powerful. you know? those representations are to be dealt with. i was trying to write against the connector presents results of the lake retching respects and i even ripped off one of his stylistic tricks, which i think is a progressive, wonderful thing that he does in his novels, the border novels, the border trilogy he doesn't italicize spanish. [inaudible] >> exactly. thank you. was she raises the border between english and spanish and renders a true kind of border representation of the way language is going. that's a wonderful thing he did. i'm sure there's a chicana writer that did it before him that will forever remain nameless, you know? but he popularized it in god new

york. i do kind of fight for that. by the time of the argument, "the new york times" is even doing it. so ultimately, >> we have some controversy. >> i think we have time for two more questions. >> the pueblo be in the commerce, you know, maybe a savior in someway of the culture. do you think they would then be an interior little bit -- i mean, there's a little bit now, but the civil war in a sense? i mean, like the casino native americans kind of saved their people because it poured money into the community there. but then it sort of got out of control. you know, like an animal farm? like the casino indian are kind

of separate now. they're like white men with businesses and stuff. do you think there could become enough of a movement for the respect for those places? credit balance the power? >> yes, absolutely. sure, anything is possible. i believe that miracles can happen. i believe that change can come. i often -- i argue a lot in my own family we have a lot of different political points of your one of the earliest arguments i had with her grandfather in el salvador during the civil war which he said this is just the way it is. there's rich people and poor people as i was going to be that way. and i had the young man, believed and revolutions that no, we can change this. and guess what? the fmln is in charge of el salvador today.

not the desk on recognize. so yes, of course it's possible and there's progressive things that have come out of the casino economy and social classes that come out of the casino company and its terrain that is not the purview of this book. i had ambitions to write more about the pueblo situation. they were our neighbors. we were living within a couple miles, but ultimately right now the pueblo still want to be represented by outsiders and they put up a wall. and if i was on the brink of vanden had been dealing with 500 years about representations are misrepresentations, i do the same thing. they thank you.

>> 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. it is only when i move to the stimuli so far the west was away. this is a different west. so there's been some shows in washington over the west in those paintings you're talking about come in a very controversial show about the tags in a sonnet. the native american bcm husband eastern, including manhattan beach is tied to the west. but it's closer though. i was wondering if you have many different kinds of reactions in those areas? >> well, we are west of the west here. but you're saying, los angeles is and isn't the last. so you know, talking about this nla is different yet i was just in new mexico reading and in santa fe reading before a very

well-heeled audience that has its neighbors straight next door. so they have particular valence to read this. i think the west dies and cancer as a canvas upon which the country and what i'm trying to argue here is the most recent boom and bust and the terrible price that was paid and we are still paying was at its most radical and violent in the last. phoenix, san bernardino, denver. what happened there in terms of the foreclosure crisis was worse than anywhere else in the country. the employment rate was worse. population growth and ecological devastation that occurred as the

result was worse than anywhere else in the country. so the way we represent the last friend today and here on in, i mean, i've read the arguments, agree with it or not about the unholy alliance of the real estate speculation, early on in the expansion of the west. well, here we are again today, another crisis point in the last. how do we represent that today and what does it mean for the rest of the country? think the project of representing the west is crucial to our future as americans. and that is why it is called desert america. >> it is a great place to land. let's give ben martinez a warm applause. [applause] >> for more information about the author, visit his website, trained to.l.a. >> next weekend on booktv on

c-span 2, the 12th annual national book festival will take place on the national mall in washington d.c. some of the panelists and guess covered by the include to wrinkly, daniel turgut, sally bell smith, david and julie nixon eisenhower, tom m., david airiness. those are just some of the authors they see her at the national book festival. so join booktv on c-span 2 next weekend. ..