S4E7: The Southwest's Hidden Urban Histories with Kyle Paoletta

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:21 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clark, and in this episode, we're going to do something that's a little bit less likely to stomp on your rage buttons than some of our previous episodes might have. I mean, like having the country fall apart on us as we speak with a looming authoritarian takeover doesn't excuse us from the need to continue to learn and grow and add information to our store of life experience.

0:01:16 - (Chris Clarke): Because we're going to need to be as smart as we can possibly be to fight back against all this. And I think this episode is going to help us do just that in understanding the deserts of North America a little bit more deeply. We have joining us in our remote studio reporter and journalist Kyle Paoletta, whose recent book American Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest was published in mid-January by Pantheon.

0:01:42 - (Chris Clarke): American Oasis is a really deeply educational and exhaustively researched perspective on the southwestern U.S. and it's a fresh perspective in that rather than talking about the wide open spaces of the Southwest, the unpopulated vistas where you can see 100 miles and no evidence of humanity in there among the red rocks and cacti, Kyle points out in American Oasis that the Southwest is the most urbanized landscape in the US Most of us in the Southwest live in cities.

0:02:17 - (Chris Clarke): In American Oasis, Kyle profiles Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and Las Vegas. These are cities that, in the words of the publisher, seem to exist independently of the seemingly inhospitable and arid landscape that surrounds them. I ordered my copy of American Oasis when it came out and I gotta say, reading this book has been one of the high points of the last six to eight weeks, just put it that way. Kyle's reporting and his criticism has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, New York Magazine, the Nation, New Republic, etc. He's got an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. He's worked at GQ and New York Magazine.

0:03:02 - (Chris Clarke): Kyle grew up in Albuquerque, as he will discuss, and is currently living in San Diego, California. I hope you really enjoy this conversation that we had with Kyle, but before we get to that, I wanted to report a positive update. Last episode I was talking about a troubling slowdown in our taking on new donors. Since January 22nd we had had no new recurring donors pop up. We had one one-time donation for which we were quite grateful from an old friend.

0:03:34 - (Chris Clarke): But I'm happy to report that this.

0:03:35 - (Chris Clarke): Week we have some new donors who have joined our motley crew, and they are Allison Irwin, Ashley Peterson, Claire Vaye Watkins, who we will have on this podcast to talk about her writing, and Peter Vlastelica. In addition, an existing donor, Fred Bell, doubled his monthly donation as a result of hearing that episode. I believe so Alison, Ashley, Claire, Peter and Fred, we are grateful. Thank you so much.

0:04:05 - (Chris Clarke): Now, if you want to join these wonderful folks and supporting the only podcast that focuses on environmental issues across the deserts of North America from Zacatecas to Idaho, go to 90miles from needles.com donate and you can make a one-time donation of any amount from a dollar up. Or you can make that donation recurring and we look forward to hearing from you. We also have a new vendor for our merch.

0:04:30 - (Chris Clarke): You can buy T shirts. Right now it's mostly T shirts, but we're going to add more stuff. You can buy them with our podcast logo done by the wonderful Martin Mancha. You can get our Desert Liberation Front T shirt with a militant coyote raising her fist against a desert background. There's also our Resist line of shirts which basically just says the word resist. I'm sure you can think of places you'd want to wear that.

0:05:00 - (Chris Clarke): You can check them all out at 90 miles from needles.com merch and speaking of buying stuff, if this interview gets you interested in checking out your own copy of American Oasis, you can pick that up at our bookstore at T-H-E-Da-m n.org books that's T H E and the acronym for Desert Advocacy Media Network D A M n dot org BOOKS. Now, with no further ado, let's get to our interview with Kyle Paoletta, author of American Finding the Future in the Cities of the.

0:06:26 - (Chris Clarke): Kyle Paoletta, thank you so much for joining us here on 90 miles from Needles.

0:06:31 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

0:06:33 - (Chris Clarke): Now, your book American Oasis has been on my bedside table for probably a good four or five weeks at this point, and it's just a really wonderful read. I'm wondering how the seed got planted for this book.

0:06:47 - (Kyle Paoletta): Sure, yeah. I think for me it's a book that I've been mulling over for a long time before I started working on it full time. But I think it really started germinating honestly when I first Moved to the.

0:07:04 - (Kyle Paoletta): East coast for college.

0:07:06 - (Kyle Paoletta): So I grew up in Albuquerque and just was born in New Mexico and lived there until I moved to Boston for college. And it just like, really struck me.

0:07:18 - (Kyle Paoletta): As soon as I lived on the.

0:07:20 - (Kyle Paoletta): East coast, just how little people out there know about the Southwest, just how limited the. The reference points or if they visited.

0:07:30 - (Kyle Paoletta): It'S maybe to go to the Grand.

0:07:32 - (Kyle Paoletta): Canyon, maybe they've got a relative who retired in Scottsdale, that kind of thing. So I feel like I was always met with this almost perplexity about the place I was from that only gradually improved when Breaking Bad came out, because it was like, oh, now there's a big TV show.

0:07:50 - (Kyle Paoletta): So people are like, oh, Albuquerque. I've watched some episodes about that place.

0:07:54 - (Kyle Paoletta): So, yeah, I think I've always had this real sense of wanting to help.

0:08:00 - (Kyle Paoletta): Explain the Southwest to the rest of the country.

0:08:03 - (Kyle Paoletta): And the book came together for me, like, when I was actually visiting Las Vegas probably, I don't know, five, six years ago, and just had a really intense feeling of how similar it was to Albuquerque. Just hanging out in the part of.

0:08:19 - (Kyle Paoletta): The city closer to the university.

0:08:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): And it just felt so similar to the northeast heights of Albuquerque and also parts of Phoenix I'd been to that had this kind of. It was really clarifying about the kind.

0:08:34 - (Kyle Paoletta): Of urban fabric being shared across the region.

0:08:38 - (Kyle Paoletta): And I think that's when I started writing more about the Southwest and certainly about the culture and doing more reporting.

0:08:45 - (Kyle Paoletta): About climate change and water issues.

0:08:48 - (Kyle Paoletta): And so that all came together in this book that I hope goes through the five big cities. So Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson and El Paso, and tells their history, tells going back to ancient times with the.

0:09:03 - (Kyle Paoletta): Ancestral Puebloan peoples and the ancestral Sooran.

0:09:06 - (Kyle Paoletta): Peoples all the way to the present day, showing how these places got integrated into America. And then now, as it's getting hotter, it's getting drier.

0:09:19 - (Kyle Paoletta): The problems we've had in the Southwest.

0:09:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): Forever are now universal. And so what are the lessons that.

0:09:26 - (Kyle Paoletta): You know, Maryland or Kansas can learn from the Southwest as they're suddenly dealing with water scarcity, forest fires and so on?

0:09:35 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. And would love to dig into that a little bit, but I'm. I'm struck by the fact that it's hard for me to think of another book about the Southwest that focuses entirely on urban landscapes, except for those that are like histories of a particular city, like Nogales. I'm in the middle of reading a book about the sewage systems in Nogales and struggles over the cross border.

0:09:59 - (Kyle Paoletta): Oh, yeah.

0:10:00 - (Chris Clarke): Management and things like that. And certainly there's been books about Tucson and books about Phoenix and such. But taking the cities of the Southwest outside of California as a topic unto itself is certainly unusual. I don't know that there is another book that has done even remotely similar work.

0:10:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): Thank you.

0:10:22 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, I felt that way too because it's.

0:10:24 - (Kyle Paoletta): I don't know, even if you're talking.

0:10:25 - (Kyle Paoletta): About kind of novels or poetry or something, it's like a lot of the kind of literature of the Southwest is Willa Cather or Tony Hillerman.

0:10:36 - (Kyle Paoletta): It's all very much based in the.

0:10:38 - (Kyle Paoletta): Landscape and it makes sense because the.

0:10:40 - (Kyle Paoletta): Landscape'S spectacular and it's something that you.

0:10:42 - (Kyle Paoletta): Really treasure growing up there or living there. But yeah, I think I had a similar realization when I was working on the book and doing research and finding Las Vegas.

0:10:55 - (Kyle Paoletta): There's like a whole library of philosophers and scholars being like, what's the deal with Las Vegas?

0:11:00 - (Kyle Paoletta): Or there's these kind of like small city histories.

0:11:04 - (Kyle Paoletta): But yeah, the region felt very unstudied in a strange way.

0:11:08 - (Kyle Paoletta): Or at least the idea of most.

0:11:10 - (Kyle Paoletta): People who live in the desert live in a big city. It's the most urbanized region in the country by far.

0:11:16 - (Kyle Paoletta): If you look at Nevada, something like 90, 95% of the population is either.

0:11:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): In Las Vegas or Reno.

0:11:23 - (Kyle Paoletta): And so like you have to.

0:11:25 - (Kyle Paoletta): If you want to write about the region, you have to write about its cities.

0:11:29 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. As you went through, I found it interesting that for each treatment of each city, you pick a lens. Albuquerque, it was the Pueblo Revolt and your own personal experience growing up, the kind of focused that chapter. If I get any of these differently than you intended, just we can chat about that. But Phoenix was Arizona highways, which was really cool. Tucson was architecture. And then El Paso, it was.

0:12:03 - (Chris Clarke): Seemed to me like really was the discussion of the border as well as the long term history. And just the fact that El Paso and Juarez are basically the same city.

0:12:14 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, absolutely.

0:12:15 - (Chris Clarke): Just wondering how you arrived at that approach. It's really creative and it was very interesting and you seem to get to the same place more or less with each city. But yeah, it was just a surprising and interesting approach.

0:12:31 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, yeah. I can't say that's how I started out writing the book, but I think it. I don't know, I think that working on it and the combination of doing a bunch of research, but also a lot of reporting. As a writer, I often have this. There's just like things that I think.

0:12:52 - (Kyle Paoletta): Are really cool or interesting or revealing.

0:12:55 - (Kyle Paoletta): Or history I wish was known that Isn't. I think I just. I ended up with all this stuff in each city that then I had to really think about, okay, what is.

0:13:08 - (Kyle Paoletta): The connective tissue here?

0:13:09 - (Kyle Paoletta): What is the thing that makes all.

0:13:12 - (Kyle Paoletta): Of this kind of feel coherent and feel of this place?

0:13:16 - (Kyle Paoletta): So taking Tucson as an example. Yeah, that chapter is very much focused on architecture and the built environment. And that's largely because I became really obsessed with this architect, Judith Chaffee, who figured out this amazing design language of using high modernism with real indigenous ancestral ways of building to create this. A number of really just unique and fascinating buildings that this is mostly. She was working in the 1970s and 80s.

0:13:52 - (Kyle Paoletta): These were passive houses before that was a like term in architecture. They were extremely energy efficient, really sensitive to where the sunlight's coming, how to.

0:14:03 - (Kyle Paoletta): Keep the heat down.

0:14:05 - (Kyle Paoletta): And so I was like, really interested in her. And then I was also really interested in the history of urban renewal there, because this urban renewal happened everywhere in America. But Tucson was a city that really.

0:14:18 - (Kyle Paoletta): Had its core hollowed out, and that core was almost entirely Mexican American.

0:14:25 - (Kyle Paoletta): And thinking about the history of how this huge neighborhood that was known as El Calle in downtown Tucson was basically.

0:14:33 - (Kyle Paoletta): Flattened to build a convention center and a bunch of government offices.

0:14:37 - (Kyle Paoletta): And that's happening at the same time that Judith Chaffee is building these really sensitive, intelligent buildings. I was sort of like, I need to figure, like these two things happened.

0:14:50 - (Kyle Paoletta): In the same place at the same time.

0:14:52 - (Kyle Paoletta): So it pushed me, I think, as a writer to tell a more complicated story, but one that only really makes.

0:14:59 - (Kyle Paoletta): Sense thematically or with a real sense.

0:15:02 - (Kyle Paoletta): Of attention to, I don't know, maybe.

0:15:05 - (Kyle Paoletta): The less obvious parts of these cities. Histories.

0:15:08 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah.

0:15:08 - (Chris Clarke): Reading the section on El Calle, I was put in mind of a similar occurrence that happened in Palm Springs. Palm Springs is checkerboarded. Every other square mile belongs to the Caliente Cahuilla. And they have not always had the ability financially or legally to develop their land. And so there's this one section, square mile of Palm Springs, Section 14. That was basically where black people and Indians lived, right?

0:15:38 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah.

0:15:38 - (Chris Clarke): And it got bulldozed. People lost everything they had. It's just the city fathers of Palm Springs decided to bulldoze the place. And some of the most. I think most of that section is still vacant. Still vacant lots and such. There's some strip malls here and there, but.

0:15:55 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, that's.

0:15:56 - (Kyle Paoletta): I'm so glad you brought that up.

0:15:57 - (Kyle Paoletta): Because that was like history that I had gotten into in an early draft of the book that ended up not.

0:16:04 - (Kyle Paoletta): Being in the final version because the editor wanted to keep the focus on.

0:16:08 - (Kyle Paoletta): The five biggest cities. But I ended up writing like a newsletter about it, like using some of that.

0:16:14 - (Kyle Paoletta): And the Section 14 story, I think is so fascinating because it just.

0:16:19 - (Kyle Paoletta): The ways in which, I don't know, you have, like, you say this really unique situation where half of the land in Palm Springs belongs to the Cahuilla. And then it's this really awful moment of that tribe working with the Anglo kind of powers that be to displace a lot of mostly black and Mexican families. And. Yeah, just like a really ugly moment in history that I know there's still.

0:16:52 - (Kyle Paoletta): A lot of ongoing talk about reparations and trying to repair the damage.

0:16:57 - (Kyle Paoletta): And. Yeah, I think all of these cities.

0:17:00 - (Kyle Paoletta): Have some version of that.

0:17:01 - (Kyle Paoletta): Phoenix, there was tremendous displacement of the.

0:17:04 - (Kyle Paoletta): Barrios when they were expanding the airport in the 80s.

0:17:08 - (Kyle Paoletta): Albuquerque had a kind of a smaller version of what happened in Tucson. Yeah, I think that a big part of my book is talking about these were cities when we're talking about Albuquerque, Tucson and El Paso that existed.

0:17:24 - (Kyle Paoletta): Most of them had a indigenous population for centuries before the Spanish arrived, but.

0:17:29 - (Kyle Paoletta): Then they were Spanish settlements. But then after 1848 and the Mexican American War, there's this real concentrated push to make them American, Anglicize them, to make them look like a city more.

0:17:47 - (Kyle Paoletta): In the Midwest or the Northeast.

0:17:50 - (Kyle Paoletta): And that kind of leads eventually to.

0:17:53 - (Kyle Paoletta): Exactly what we're talking about.

0:17:55 - (Kyle Paoletta): These really brutal moments of just forced displacement. And. Yeah, that's. I think that is a.

0:18:02 - (Kyle Paoletta): It's a scar on every city that I write about in the book.

0:18:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:18:06 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah.

0:18:06 - (Chris Clarke): I was especially taken with the. The description of the growing civil rights movement in Las Vegas, to the point where I've been looking for good titles that go into it in more depth than you were able to, just because you were talking about other cities in the same book. But it's not a story I had heard before. And that in itself is shameful.

0:18:31 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, it's like a moment in civil rights history that is very under.

0:18:38 - (Kyle Paoletta): Underrepresented.

0:18:39 - (Kyle Paoletta): I think naturally, a lot of the history of civil rights movement is concentrated.

0:18:44 - (Kyle Paoletta): In the Deep South.

0:18:45 - (Kyle Paoletta): But, yeah, that. What I specifically get into is in Las Vegas, there was a huge moment.

0:18:53 - (Kyle Paoletta): In the welfare rights movement since then.

0:18:55 - (Kyle Paoletta): About 1971, 1972, where mostly black women without partners, but with children who relied on welfare to be able to feed their kids were just having their benefits, like, cut savagely. And this was something that Ronald Reagan.

0:19:16 - (Kyle Paoletta): Was doing in California when he was.

0:19:18 - (Kyle Paoletta): The governor and was Followed by Governor Laxalt in Nevada, who is his buddy. And so these women banded together. And I specifically highlight Ruby Duncan, who was just an amazing woman who had grown up in rural Mississippi, moved to Nevada as part of the second great Migration, and then survived a abusive husband, gone off on her own with her kids, been working for a while before she had a bad injury.

0:19:50 - (Kyle Paoletta): Basically, she was working in a kitchen.

0:19:52 - (Kyle Paoletta): On the Strip and slipped in oil and injured her back. And so after that, she was relying on welfare benefits, and she ended up.

0:20:02 - (Kyle Paoletta): In a class with a bunch of.

0:20:03 - (Kyle Paoletta): Other women in a similar position who were learning how to be seamstresses. And they were all just sharing stories about how awful the welfare officers were. And these things where if there was.

0:20:16 - (Kyle Paoletta): A man present in your house when.

0:20:18 - (Kyle Paoletta): The welfare officer visited, he would just.

0:20:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): Say, oh, she's married.

0:20:22 - (Kyle Paoletta): She doesn't.

0:20:23 - (Kyle Paoletta): We could figure off the rolls, regardless if it's your cousin or something. Right.

0:20:27 - (Kyle Paoletta): And then. Yeah, so she. She helped organize this welfare organization that they marched down the Strip and shut down a bunch of casinos. And they did this twice. And it was such a kind of. I think I have a quote in there that I take from the historian.

0:20:49 - (Kyle Paoletta): Anneliese Orlick, who wrote a great book about this that's called Storming Caesar's Palace.

0:20:54 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, excellent. Thank you.

0:20:55 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah. So check it out. But she quotes Duncan as saying, this.

0:21:00 - (Kyle Paoletta): Is the pocketbook of Nevada about this trip. If we can stop business here, we can force attention.

0:21:07 - (Kyle Paoletta): And they did it, and they managed to get all of their many, much.

0:21:11 - (Kyle Paoletta): Of their welfare benefits restored.

0:21:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah.

0:21:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): Just a really inspiring story and one.

0:21:18 - (Kyle Paoletta): That I think is not often talked about in Las Vegas because the mob history is really kind of sexy and interesting.

0:21:26 - (Kyle Paoletta): The casinos on their own are just like, fascinating places.

0:21:30 - (Kyle Paoletta): But I think the working class history there tells you a lot about the city and the sense of solidarity that.

0:21:39 - (Kyle Paoletta): Working people have there.

0:21:41 - (Kyle Paoletta): And even I, in the book, I go from the welfare rights movement into.

0:21:46 - (Kyle Paoletta): More the present day and talking about.

0:21:47 - (Kyle Paoletta): Labor organizing and seiu, which is probably the most powerful labor organization in the state. And there's. It's one of the only places in the country where you can work as.

0:22:01 - (Kyle Paoletta): Like a bartender and afford to buy a house. And it's because the workers organized.

0:22:06 - (Kyle Paoletta): And. Yeah, I mean, that. That is a. I think, again, if.

0:22:09 - (Kyle Paoletta): Talking about lessons for the rest of the country, I'm like, if we had.

0:22:13 - (Kyle Paoletta): Working people and poor people advocating for.

0:22:17 - (Kyle Paoletta): Themselves everywhere, the way people in Las Vegas historically have, I think we'd be in a lot better shape.

0:22:22 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, definitely. That part of that chapter is almost cinematic in the way you reveal things and move the story along, and complete with celebrity cameos here and there. I think it'd be a really interesting topic for a documentary.

0:22:37 - (Kyle Paoletta): Oh, for sure. It's not a Las Vegas story if there's not Frank Sinatra showing up as.

0:22:42 - (Chris Clarke): Sammy Davis Jr. Sammy Davis Jr. Yeah.

0:22:46 - (Kyle Paoletta): Joe Louis. They're all there on the west side.

0:22:48 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah.

0:22:49 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. There's a lot of research in this book. It was really impressive, just the number of things I learned per paragraph. What was the thing that you learned in the course of putting this book together that surprised you the most?

0:23:02 - (Kyle Paoletta): Oh, that's a really interesting question, man. I mean, it. I appreciate you saying that, because it's like, I. I think when I was putting together the endnotes for the book.

0:23:12 - (Kyle Paoletta): It took me like, a month and.

0:23:13 - (Kyle Paoletta): A half or something.

0:23:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): It's like, there's a lot of research in there.

0:23:17 - (Kyle Paoletta): I think the thing that kind of blew my mind was actually about Albuquerque, and it's that there were two versions of Albuquerque, two separate cities that existed.

0:23:32 - (Kyle Paoletta): Side by side for about 70 years.

0:23:35 - (Kyle Paoletta): And this is. This is history that we never learned about in school in New Mexico.

0:23:41 - (Kyle Paoletta): It's not something anyone ever talked about.

0:23:43 - (Kyle Paoletta): There's the original La Via de Albuquerque, which is founded in 1706 by the Spanish. And then in 1880, when the Santa.

0:23:55 - (Kyle Paoletta): Fe Railroad comes to town and builds.

0:23:57 - (Kyle Paoletta): A depot, they built it one mile east of the city, and that became New Albuquerque. And so from about 1880 to 1953, I think they were two separate cities. They and New Albuquerque basically grew up around it and then swallowed what's now Old Town Plaza. And then after New Albuquerque annexed Old Albuquerque, it adopted the original founding date, 1706, which then allowed them, when I.

0:24:32 - (Kyle Paoletta): Was in high school, to be, like, the tricentennial celebration.

0:24:35 - (Kyle Paoletta): The city's 300 years old, when, in fact, like, part of the city was that old.

0:24:41 - (Kyle Paoletta): The part that had consumed it was much younger.

0:24:45 - (Kyle Paoletta): But, yeah, that was just.

0:24:46 - (Kyle Paoletta): It's.

0:24:46 - (Kyle Paoletta): It was one of those kind of things that you read that really makes you reconsider everything, or really, it really. That was something that when I was first putting the book together that I had found, and I think it helped me really shape the book, because if there's this sort of embedded history in the place that I grew up in.

0:25:09 - (Kyle Paoletta): And feel like I know so much.

0:25:11 - (Kyle Paoletta): About, like, what else needs to be.

0:25:13 - (Kyle Paoletta): Uncovered and what else needs to have.

0:25:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): A light shined on it, and then how does a. How does uncovering that information help you understand the history of the place, but also how does it help you understand the present? And it's that idea of, oh, these were two separate cities in New Mexico, which loves to talk about, oh, our three cultures, this kind of amazing multi ethnic fabric. Like, we don't. We don't really have racism here because.

0:25:43 - (Kyle Paoletta): We'Re different than the rest of the country.

0:25:45 - (Kyle Paoletta): And here's.

0:25:46 - (Kyle Paoletta): That's obviously bullshit.

0:25:47 - (Kyle Paoletta): But also, what does us clinging to.

0:25:50 - (Kyle Paoletta): That mythology tell you about the.

0:25:53 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, that's something that, when I talk.

0:25:55 - (Kyle Paoletta): About it, it still gives me chills. I'm just like, I find it really destabilizing.

0:25:59 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, yeah. It strikes me that a lot of the cities in the Southwest have potential for, I don't know, maybe not engulfing your twin in the womb or anything like that. But cities tend to come in groups of more than one. The obvious example is El Paso, Juarez, Las Cruces.

0:26:18 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, of course.

0:26:19 - (Chris Clarke): But Phoenix and Tucson have this love, hate, relationship bond that keeps them on their toes. And I get the sense that Albuquerque and Santa Fe are roughly similar in some ways.

0:26:31 - (Kyle Paoletta): Oh, yeah. I think there's definitely the same vibe as one is the cool, artsy one.

0:26:37 - (Kyle Paoletta): That thinks it's better than the big city next door, that that dynamic definitely exists. Yeah, yeah.

0:26:44 - (Chris Clarke): As. As someone that lived in the Bay Area for much of my adult life, I definitely know what that is like with regard to our. Our attitude toward Los Angeles and.

0:26:53 - (Kyle Paoletta): Sure.

0:26:54 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah. Yeah.

0:26:55 - (Chris Clarke): And then, of course, I moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years and I love the place. Place. I've never had a more walkable neighborhood in my life than the place I lived in in Hollywood. But yeah, it just, it was interesting. And maybe that's just a product of population growing and these outposts that were kind of remote two or three days ride on horseback are now suburbs of each other. But yeah, it's. It was just interesting to me. I hadn't really thought about it in that way before. And of course, Vegas is the outlier because Vegas is there by itself for no particular reason.

0:27:27 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, it's funny, I got the opportunity to be back in the region to do some book events in January around when it came out, and my wife was traveling with me and she grew up in Boston and lived in Boston and New York exclusively until we recently moved to California. But I think I kept talking about, oh, we're doing this event in Scottsdale. I've got this friend at Tempe who's going to try and come to something.

0:27:53 - (Kyle Paoletta): Oh, yeah, this is a guy I know he lives out in Surprise or. And so like referring to all these places. And then when we got to Phoenix and we were driving around, she's, oh, wait, it's all Phoenix. And I think the way I'd been talking about it, she had the idea of, oh, these are kind of dots on the map that you have to go between. And I, I thought it was. It was funny because I'm like, that.

0:28:16 - (Kyle Paoletta): Is how they used to be. Right.

0:28:18 - (Kyle Paoletta): Like, all of those places were their own little colonies in the Valley of the Sun. And you have Mesa that was established by Mormon pioneers versus Phoenix, which was very agricultural, versus Scasso, which was always a vacation destination. And then Phoenix just grows and consumes everything.

0:28:39 - (Kyle Paoletta): And now it's all just this enormous urban sprawl.

0:28:43 - (Kyle Paoletta): But, yeah, it is. There is something, I think, something that was interesting to me thinking about, like, the way cities change and recombine was El Paso and Juarez, because unlike old Albuquerque and new Albuquerque, like one could.

0:29:00 - (Kyle Paoletta): Not consume the other because the national border that was drawn down the Rio Grande.

0:29:05 - (Kyle Paoletta): So like the original El Paso is Juarez. Like most of it, most of the population during the Spanish and Mexican eras.

0:29:14 - (Kyle Paoletta): Was south of the river.

0:29:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): And then it was only after 1848 when, you know, a bunch of Anglos come and they're. The town, I think was called Franklin originally. There were some other kind of homesteads.

0:29:28 - (Kyle Paoletta): That gradually becomes its own city. But to this day, Juarez is much larger than El Paso.

0:29:34 - (Kyle Paoletta): And I think economically, with how the NAFTA free trade and everything, like, there's much more production at the Kilotoras on the south side. And then in El Paso, it's mostly logistics and shipping.

0:29:51 - (Kyle Paoletta): All the stuff that's made down there.

0:29:54 - (Kyle Paoletta): All that's going to get a lot more complicated with the tariffs.

0:29:57 - (Chris Clarke): But yeah, I believe so. It's interesting because my impression of Juarez as someone that I'd like read the Guardian, both the British one and the extinct Marxist Leninist American one. Yeah. And just CNN and news sources like that. Mostly what I knew about Juarez was cartels and murders of women. And that's not a real great brand for a city.

0:30:27 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah. Talk about a city that's been through hell in the past 30 years. Yeah.

0:30:32 - (Chris Clarke): And I was able to spend a few days in El Paso talking to some activists there you go on Instagram. And if you follow folks on in El Paso, they will repost stuff from the. The Chihuahuan environmental movement doing the Juarez Mountains, land preservation and wildlife education and things like that. And it just seems like there's this strain of hope in the town that somehow either re sprouted or never completely died out during the really tough times. Which it's not like it's easy going now and it's probably going to get a little bit more unpleasant. But it was really nice to see the other side of Juarez, see that there are people that get off of work and make dinner and then go for a quick hike in the mountains and.

0:31:20 - (Kyle Paoletta): Totally, yeah, it's a great city. And it's definitely. I do think. I mean, I haven't spent nearly as.

0:31:27 - (Kyle Paoletta): Much time there as I wish I.

0:31:29 - (Kyle Paoletta): Have, but I do think it's a place that has a lot of really.

0:31:33 - (Kyle Paoletta): Intense pride and a lot of.

0:31:37 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, that sense of.

0:31:38 - (Kyle Paoletta): No, this is a community and has already always been a community.

0:31:42 - (Kyle Paoletta): And the cartels didn't change that.

0:31:44 - (Kyle Paoletta): The.

0:31:45 - (Kyle Paoletta): The kind of trade force won't change that. Yeah. I think it's. It's like anywhere. It's like you need to move to LA to be like, oh, yeah, LA is pretty nice. I think that's so true of Mexico, generally for Americans. I think a lot of people have a sense of Mexico as this, like, scary, dangerous place, which there's a lot of racism that feeds into that. But I think that's also just a lack of education, a lack of curiosity.

0:32:14 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:32:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): Of just a beautiful country full of, by and large, people doing what people everywhere do and also cooking some of.

0:32:23 - (Kyle Paoletta): The best food in the world and having some of the most wonderful landscapes.

0:32:29 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah. One thing that I really didn't know.

0:32:31 - (Kyle Paoletta): Before, but my appreciation really quickly for.

0:32:33 - (Kyle Paoletta): It from doing all the reporting I did for the book was just like.

0:32:38 - (Kyle Paoletta): How the landscape really unites us in.

0:32:41 - (Kyle Paoletta): The Southwest and how the ecologies of these deserts, the Mojave, the Chihuahuan and the Sonoran, that, like, I don't know. I really think that people in El Paso and Juarez and Chihuahua and Ciudad Chihuahua have a lot more in common with each other than people in El Paso and Dallas do.

0:33:07 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:33:07 - (Kyle Paoletta): And a lot of that has to do with. You're part of the same environment.

0:33:11 - (Kyle Paoletta): And I think the same goes for Tucson and Nogales and even Las Vegas.

0:33:18 - (Kyle Paoletta): And Palm Springs or there's just something.

0:33:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): About these deserts don't really care about political boundaries.

0:33:26 - (Kyle Paoletta): And if you live them and if you're really attentive to the natural world, you see all the ways in which.

0:33:34 - (Kyle Paoletta): We'Re sharing more than we're divided. And I mean, I think one of the upsetting moments of reporting was when.

0:33:40 - (Kyle Paoletta): I was doing a lot about immigration.

0:33:43 - (Kyle Paoletta): El Paso And Juarez and just like looking at the Rio Grande and it just, it's just brutal to see just this razor wire fence of a concrete ditch. And just being like, man, this is like the river of the southwest that.

0:33:59 - (Kyle Paoletta): Has just been like turned into this horrible border. I felt like so moved by that when I was there and made a.

0:34:05 - (Kyle Paoletta): Point of going and just like spending.

0:34:08 - (Kyle Paoletta): Some time on the Juarez side. Because on the El Paso side you don't. You can't even get to the river because there's too much fencing.

0:34:15 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I spent a little time in Ascarate park and just basically trying to get any view of the river I could at all. And yeah, Oscar, a park is a nice urban park, but. And it's apparently an oxbow of the river that has been preserved and then dredged out. But yeah, no, no hint that there's a river there, if you don't know. And given that El Paso was really reminding me, it was basically just a year ago that I was there.

0:34:45 - (Chris Clarke): Really reminded me of Buffalo, which is where I spent my teenage years. Buffalo, New York.

0:34:50 - (Kyle Paoletta): Interesting.

0:34:51 - (Chris Clarke): Just a kind of hopeful decrepitude of downtown El Paso that was very similar to my home in the 70s at least. Buffalo has gotten a little bit of new construction and new money infusion in the past couple decades. But it was, it was just really fascinating to see that landscape and then to go from there to Big Bend national park down by Boquillas Canyon and the river there is flowing again. It's probably only 18 inches deep, but it is flowing and people are walking back and forth across.

0:35:25 - (Chris Clarke): People that live in Boquillas wait across the river to come, sell tamales and empanadas to hikers. And just thinking borders could be ecotones. They could be places where cultural exchange happens and the whole area is richer as a result. Maybe that's what they have in the European community now. It's a vision of the border that I think not a lot of people maintain right now.

0:35:51 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, yeah, borders, I think that's something where I prefer the Spanish word I saying frontera. That it's that sense of kind of possibility in a frontier or that sense of meeting and exchanging and coming together.

0:36:10 - (Kyle Paoletta): Like is such a powerful human thing.

0:36:14 - (Kyle Paoletta): And even to this day, El Paso and Juarez, I think it's something like.

0:36:19 - (Kyle Paoletta): A hundred thousand people commute every day.

0:36:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): From Horace into El Paso. I think it's a similar number, maybe a little bit more that commute from Tijuana to San Diego every day.

0:36:29 - (Kyle Paoletta): There is still a lot of that exchange happening. Despite how militarized the border is.

0:36:35 - (Kyle Paoletta): But, but yeah, I think the. There. But in many ways we. We sadly have thought of borders as.

0:36:44 - (Kyle Paoletta): These like, things that need to be defended and. Yeah, yeah.

0:36:49 - (Chris Clarke): So before we started recording, you talked about the lost chapter in the book. Or maybe it wasn't an entire chapter. You know, you had included some discussion of the area around Joshua Tree. I'm wondering if there were any really interesting points that you made or things that you found out as you were researching that you could mention. Yeah, yeah, we had listeners outside of Joshua Tree, but it is where our core group of listeners is.

0:37:17 - (Kyle Paoletta): Totally. Yeah. I think the last chapter was about Joshua Tree as well as Marfa and.

0:37:27 - (Kyle Paoletta): To a lesser extent, like Taos.

0:37:29 - (Kyle Paoletta): This idea of the, like, desert as.

0:37:33 - (Kyle Paoletta): A kind of art colony destination, which was partially inspired by the writer Ruben Martinez.

0:37:40 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I know Ruben. Great guy.

0:37:41 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, yeah. So his book Desert America, where he writes about.

0:37:46 - (Kyle Paoletta): I think he moved to 29 palms first. Right.

0:37:49 - (Kyle Paoletta): And then he ended up. He bought a. Or him and his partner have got.

0:37:54 - (Kyle Paoletta): A place in Espanola, which is a very poor city just north of Santa.

0:37:59 - (Kyle Paoletta): Fe, that they were trying to work.

0:38:01 - (Kyle Paoletta): As artists, which often you can't do in Santa Fe itself.

0:38:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:38:05 - (Kyle Paoletta): And then he also ends up going to Marfa. But I think I was writing it more in the post pandemic moment. I was really interested in just the like crazy spike in housing prices. And I wish I could remember this.

0:38:24 - (Kyle Paoletta): Statistics about what percentage of houses in the town of Joshua Tree became Airbnbs.

0:38:30 - (Kyle Paoletta): It was like one out of every three houses.

0:38:33 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it is up around there.

0:38:35 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah. And. And I was also, because I finished the first draft of the book at Marfa because a friend of mine has.

0:38:42 - (Kyle Paoletta): A house there that she was like, I'm going to be traveling. If you need a place to write, just come here.

0:38:46 - (Kyle Paoletta): So I was like thinking about those issues in Marfa as well. And yeah, I think what I was writing about was the ways in which, I don't know, the desert remains a.

0:38:59 - (Kyle Paoletta): Place of fantasy for a lot of Americans.

0:39:01 - (Kyle Paoletta): And that's in the published version of the book. I write about that quite a lot about Phoenix. And you mentioned that Arizona highways excelling this kind of ideal of being in the desert. But I was really interested in Joshua Tree as this kind of, I don't know, just it's so close to LA that I think it allows people to have this like quick trip fantasy of.

0:39:29 - (Kyle Paoletta): Living in the desert.

0:39:31 - (Kyle Paoletta): And I don't know, during the pandemic there was so much reporting I think, especially in the LA times, about people during lockdown being like, whatever, we're going to leave our apartment in Silver Lake.

0:39:44 - (Kyle Paoletta): And get a place in Yucca Valley, and we'll have four times the space.

0:39:47 - (Kyle Paoletta): And if we need to, oh, there's a shoot you can drive back to.

0:39:52 - (Kyle Paoletta): Be on set for whatever.

0:39:54 - (Kyle Paoletta): Vaguely remembering a profile of a couple.

0:39:56 - (Kyle Paoletta): Who worked in film.

0:39:58 - (Kyle Paoletta): But just that idea of, oh, Joshua Tree is like. When you're there, it feels like the.

0:40:05 - (Kyle Paoletta): Moon in many ways and in, like, wonderful ways.

0:40:09 - (Kyle Paoletta): Like, it feels very remote and the.

0:40:12 - (Kyle Paoletta): The park itself is just very austere and very. It's the Mojave Desert.

0:40:19 - (Kyle Paoletta): It has. There's the thing.

0:40:22 - (Kyle Paoletta): The plants it has are beautiful, but they are few and far between.

0:40:25 - (Kyle Paoletta): And just that disjunction with that kind.

0:40:30 - (Kyle Paoletta): Of fantasy sense of the place, as.

0:40:33 - (Kyle Paoletta): It seemed really different to me than somewhere like Albuquerque or even Phoenix, of places that were agricultural settlements for long.

0:40:44 - (Kyle Paoletta): Before they were industrial or anything else.

0:40:49 - (Kyle Paoletta): That, with the exception of Las Vegas.

0:40:51 - (Kyle Paoletta): Basically every big city in the Southwest started as farmland.

0:40:56 - (Kyle Paoletta): And El Paso was like. There was all these vineyards where the.

0:40:59 - (Kyle Paoletta): Spanish were growing grapes that they were shipping back to Madrid.

0:41:03 - (Kyle Paoletta): But, like, Joshua Tree would have never.

0:41:07 - (Kyle Paoletta): Been a place that you did agriculture, right?

0:41:10 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, Some scattered, failed jojoba farms here.

0:41:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): So in.

0:41:16 - (Kyle Paoletta): In that sense, it's the desert in the purest sense.

0:41:19 - (Kyle Paoletta): And so I think there's something really.

0:41:20 - (Kyle Paoletta): Like, intrinsically desert about Joshua Tree that is just, like, captivating to me and clearly to plenty of other people.

0:41:29 - (Kyle Paoletta): But, yeah, I hope to revisit it. I think in the next thing I'm working on, we'll have more.

0:41:36 - (Kyle Paoletta): Probably I'll be able to revisit those ideas and dig into them a little bit more deeply.

0:41:40 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, I hope so. At the very least, the excuse to.

0:41:43 - (Kyle Paoletta): Spend more time in the Mojave I'll always gladly take.

0:41:47 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, hit us up. We'll definitely be happy to buy you dinner.

0:41:50 - (Kyle Paoletta): We'll make it happen.

0:41:51 - (Chris Clarke): Excellent. So before we leave, do you want to hear my one story about when I was in Espanola one time?

0:41:57 - (Kyle Paoletta): Oh, absolutely, please.

0:42:00 - (Chris Clarke): This was 08, and I had an old friend who had moved to Taos and was coming up to the date of her doctor's appointment in which she was going to learn what kind of cancer she had. She's still around. She's still doing fine. So it was good news. We didn't know that at the time. And so I was driving there from Nipton, which was nipped into Taos, is one of those geographical axes that I had never really thought about before, but got to Espanolo and needed to get some cash.

0:42:35 - (Chris Clarke): So I went into the parking lot of the big supermarket there and was walking from my truck toward the building. And this Trans Am, all black with the darkest tinted windows I'd seen in my life, pulled up right astride me and stopped and decals with a NorCal font all over the windows. And that checks out, black letter kind of thing. The passenger side window rolls down slowly and there is this young woman in there who is. She's quite striking.

0:43:13 - (Chris Clarke): She is probably 18 or 19 years old. And I'm this old white guy. So had no idea what she's going to ask me about except that I had hair about as long as it is now. And so maybe she was going to try and see if I wanted to buy some drugs or sell some drugs or whatever, who knows?

0:43:34 - (Kyle Paoletta): You carrying? Yeah.

0:43:36 - (Chris Clarke): Anyway, the window rolls down and she almost looks directly at me, just looks just past my ear and says, you want to buy some pinones? I thought, I'm in New Mexico.

0:43:51 - (Kyle Paoletta): Hell yeah.

0:43:53 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:43:54 - (Kyle Paoletta): That's when you're like, yes, sis, let's do this. That's amazing. Can I tell you my Lander story?

0:44:01 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, absolutely.

0:44:03 - (Kyle Paoletta): So this was, I think this was, it was definitely during like pandemic era. So it was like maybe 20, 21. I think it was like the first traveling that I'd really done after getting vaccinated and stuff. So I was with my wife and we'd been like, we were being pretty.

0:44:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): Cautious so we were trying to like.

0:44:22 - (Kyle Paoletta): Only be places where we could eat outside. And I think we, we went to the. Was this like the big rock, that pizza place.

0:44:32 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, giant rock, yeah, giant rock, yeah.

0:44:34 - (Kyle Paoletta): So we went there because I sang out on the patio. There was whoever was playing, it was like someone with a stand up bass.

0:44:45 - (Kyle Paoletta): And a guitar playing like very spacey.

0:44:47 - (Kyle Paoletta): Weird music which was pretty, pretty suitable for the evening. But it was like so loud that we like couldn't really talk. So it's the sort of thing where you're at a restaurant, you're just like.

0:44:57 - (Kyle Paoletta): Watching the other people.

0:44:59 - (Kyle Paoletta): And this couple came in or it was these two guys and one of them was wearing like, I don't know.

0:45:10 - (Kyle Paoletta): Like head to toe black.

0:45:12 - (Kyle Paoletta): Looked like an architect, like very kind of, I don't know, downtown style. And then his friend was in like a safari outfit with like, he had a big like cowboy hat, but he also had the, I don't know, wax, waxy fabric ready for any conditions. And he had A big, like, hunter's knife, like, sticking out of his belt. It's just like, the dude was on safari. And so they were, like, hanging out, getting a beer.

0:45:42 - (Kyle Paoletta): And eventually, like, a woman came in. So I was like, oh, maybe they're meeting her and they, like, got a pizza. And so it's just like watching these three people. And then at some point in the evening, it seemed like there was a.

0:45:57 - (Kyle Paoletta): Little bit of a problem with the three of them. So I was like, all right, whatever.

0:46:02 - (Kyle Paoletta): But the guy who had the big knife and was wearing a hat, he leaves slightly disgruntled. And when he's walking out, because we're.

0:46:12 - (Kyle Paoletta): Just see the parking lot, because we're.

0:46:13 - (Kyle Paoletta): Sitting outside, I realize that the vehicle.

0:46:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): He gets into is a dune buggy. And so he just gets in there.

0:46:21 - (Kyle Paoletta): And fires it up and just, like.

0:46:25 - (Kyle Paoletta): Jets step back towards Yucca Valley and throw at night.

0:46:29 - (Kyle Paoletta): And I was just like, man, watching this goober with his safari night drive his dune buggy while this experimental bass music is playing, I was like, man.

0:46:41 - (Kyle Paoletta): This is a weird freaking place.

0:46:43 - (Chris Clarke): Welcome to the Morongo Basin.

0:46:45 - (Kyle Paoletta): Yeah, exactly.

0:46:47 - (Chris Clarke): Kyle, I am just so grateful to you for making some time to talk to us today. Thanks for joining us.

0:46:52 - (Kyle Paoletta): My pleasure. Yeah, you guys do great work. So it's. I'm really happy to do it and it's a nice conversation.

0:46:59 - (Chris Clarke): Kyle Paoletta, the author of American Oasis, which is now available at the Desert Advocacy Media Network bookstore at the dam T-H-E-DA-M-N.org books. It's been a pleasure.

0:47:15 - (Kyle Paoletta): Thanks so much.

0:47:48 - (Chris Clarke): That wraps up this episode episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Big thanks to Kyle Paoletta  for talking to us, giving us a little bit of insight into his book American Oasis, your own copy of which you can score at the Desert Advocacy Media Network's online Bookstore at T-H-E-DA-M-N.org Books thedam.org Books we love the Desert Advocacy Media Network Network's acronym again. I want to thank Peter Vlastelika, Claire VAY Watkins, Ashley Peterson and Ali Irwin for joining the growing pool of our regular donors.

0:48:27 - (Chris Clarke): And Fred Bell for doubling his monthly contribution. You guys are awesome. Those of you listening, if you want to be awesome. 290miles from needles.com donate I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork creator. Our theme song, moody Western, is by Brightside Studio. Other music in this episode is by Rimstunes and Cinemedia. We got a little bit of a treat in this part of the Mojave last week in the form of a fraction of an inch of rain. We actually had puddles in our driveway when I got out in the morning, and I got out in the morning to go for a hike with a couple of friends, and there was at least one pool of water that we found that wasn't there the day before.

0:49:22 - (Chris Clarke): Water in the desert is magic, and so are you, my friends. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting what we're doing here. Please share this episode around if you like it. In fact, if you don't like it, share it anyway and explain why you don't like it. Maybe we can get a good conversation going. Take care of yourselves and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.

0:49:47 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.