The Southwest’s Lessons for Our Dry Future
With Kyle Paoletta
Earlier this week, I spoke with journalist and critic Kyle Paoletta about the history of cities in the Southwest. In his new book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, he writes, “To see where America is going we have to look at where the Southwest has already been.” So we traced where the Southwest has been, from hundreds of years ago to the present day, before I asked Kyle about the future of our relationship to fire and water—a conversation that felt way, way too topical amid the devastation in L.A. I also got really hung up on Phoenix almost having a different, far superior name.
A condensed transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to the podcast audio, where we cover a lot more ground and Kyle argues that Las Vegas might be a mirror of America, rather than an aberration:
Ben: Let’s start with Albuquerque, your hometown, and New Mexico’s “unique comity between Hispanics, Anglos, and Native Americans.” For you, why is that relationship a myth?
KP: If you grew up in New Mexico, there’s a mythos of the three cultures weaving a tight social fabric—a sense of continuity and perseverance in this extremely hostile desert environment that obscures how contested the history of the state has been.
Starting with Coronado, the first Spaniard to arrive in the area out of Mexico in 1540, he fought very bloody confrontations with the Pueblos in what is now Albuquerque, where there were about a dozen different villages. Flash forward to 1598 and Oñate, the Spaniard who established the permanent colony of New Mexico. He most infamously had a confrontation with the Pueblo of Acoma, who live in this kind of amazing natural fortress. Oñate ordered that the left foot of every Acoma man be cut off and all of the women and children sold into slavery—ultimately leading to the Pueblo Revolt, a broad effort to kick the Spanish out.
Ben: I was fascinated by the Pueblo Revolt. You note, “It stands as one of the few moments in American history when a network of Indigenous communities managed not just to hold European colonizers at bay, but to fully jettison them from their homeland.”
KP: Absolutely. The person thought to have spearheaded the revolt was a man named Po’pay, from Ohkay Owingeh, the nearest pueblo to Santa Fe. While Oñate is romanticized as a founder of New Mexico by many people, Po’Pay is remembered as a great resistance leader, an icon for people who objected to colonialism and settlement.
While Po’Pay succeeded in helping boot the Spanish out, in 1692, the Spanish returned. In school, we learned about this as La Reconquista: a peaceful reconquering, where Diego de Vargas reentered Santa Fe without firing a shot. For decades there was a pageant in Santa Fe commemorating the reconquest and very much promulgating this idea of Indigenous peoples gladly accepting the return of the Spanish. But—
Ben: —I sense a spoiler—
KP: —ha, yes—spoiler—it was just as bloody as the first eras of settlement had been.
After brutal wars against the Plains Indians in the 1870s and 1880s, a weird kind of macabre nostalgia sank in of let's go find these peoples before they vanish.
And that grew into part of the tourist selling point of New Mexico, leading to Santa Fe and Taos becoming these art colonies where you can paint a romantic image of a Diné rider on a horse out on the mesa—troubling practices and images that are still with us today.
Ben: You're touching on something that shifts us to Phoenix: a concerted effort to convince (white) people to stay in the Southwest rather than travel through it en route to California.
Can you talk about the growth of Phoenix and why it should be called Pumpkinville?
KP: Ha, sure. One thing that always bothered me when I was growing up in Albuquerque is: how did Phoenix get so much bigger?
In the book, I go back to the idea of the desert as a vacant place in need of settling. During and after the Civil War, there was a push by the federal government to get people out to this huge swath of territory that the U.S. had just conquered from Mexico. But the problem in New Mexico, as we've been discussing, was there were all these people there—cultures that had existed for hundreds if not thousands of years.
In Arizona, it was a little different. Of course, there were also Indigenous people there. In the Salt River Valley, an agricultural society that archaeologists refer to as the Hohokam had thrived for around a thousand years, between 500 and 1500 CE, until some climatic changes pushed them to consolidate elsewhere.
Ben: We've covered the Little Ice Age and the impact on Indigenous organization previously, so it might sound familiar to readers.
KP: Totally. So, there's a legend that two guys, part of this wave of people seeking fortune in the Southwest, used old irrigation canals from the Hohokam to start farming. The first couple dozen people there met to decide on what they were going to call the place, and before landing on Phoenix, one of the suggestions was Pumpkinville because gourds grow very well in the Southwest.
Ben: Regardless of the veracity of the legend, nothing can top Pumpkinville. Not Zucchinishire, not Delicataton, not New Butternut—I want Pumpkinville!
KP: I mean, Arizona has given us many great town names, including Surprise and Goodyear, but imagining the version of Phoenix where everything is a riff on a gourd might be an improvement.
Ben: I hope you detail the possibilities in an updated afterword for your book.
KP: Haha. Once they decided Pumpkinville was out and Phoenix was in, there was a rapid growth in agriculture.
By World War II, there were around 100,000 people living in Phoenix. The city tried attracting a lot of industry, particularly aerospace, in the years after World War II, while showering tax breaks and wining and dining people from the Midwest.
The booster class in Albuquerque and El Paso was trying to draw people in, too, but faced a different challenge. Any CEO thinking about expansion would hear Spanish or Tewa, an Indigenous language, on the street. In Phoenix, all of that could just be completely ignored. By 1970, it was much larger than anywhere else in the Southwest. It set the mold for what a desert city could be, which Las Vegas followed.
Vegas is even newer, settled around 1903-1905. Its growth in the past 30-40 years mirrors Phoenix after World War II. The primary industry is vice, but boosters followed a similar playbook, offering a playground where visitors could imagine a blank slate to make their own. Vegas and Phoenix have created a split between the old Southwest and the new Southwest—between the cities with a deep foundation in Indigenous and colonial history, and newer cities without it.
Still, one thing connects them all: water.
Ben: Water is a central piece of this history—and the future. Can you talk a little bit about the reforms (or lack thereof) that have proven effective in places like Phoenix and Vegas?
KP: Sure. I think when you come from the desert, you’re much more aware of water’s importance because it has a tendency to disappear.
The placement of the cities I write about is very much tied to water. Albuquerque and El Paso are on the Rio Grande, Phoenix is on the Salt River, Tucson is on the Santa Cruz. Las Vegas was only able to grow because it's adjacent to Lake Mead, a man-made source. As much water as these cities use, they’re much more efficient than any city on the East Coast. Las Vegas recycles 40 percent of all of the water that it takes out of Lake Mead.
At the same time, there's also been a real reckoning within the Southwest—in Phoenix, in particular—about development that requires groundwater. Basically, there’s not enough water in the aquifers outside of the central core of Phoenix to supply the houses that have already been built. And yet, in the book, I talk about a place called Buckeye, far out on the western edge of Phoenix, that has annexed more land than is in San Diego.
One of the things I wrestle with is if we want to keep living in the desert and keep growing, we need to stop building out in the unreclaimed desert. Instead, we need apartment buildings and denser development in places where there are water recycling systems. Consolidating in order to survive, I think, will be really necessary in the 21st century.
Ben: Speaking of dry history (not from an engagement standpoint), I wanted to ask you about the fires in L.A. What from your research seems relevant or instructive as you’ve watched the fires unfold?
KP: Yeah. It's been pretty horrifying.
For me, when I'm thinking about fire in the age of climate crisis, we need to start listening to the limits that nature has put on us. And again, I think that question comes back to how we live more compactly.
One of the great things about California and why it remains, in my mind, such a wonderful part of America is its access to nature. The coast is so much less developed than on the East Coast. You have spectacular mountains and beautiful desert vistas in Southern California.
It’s hard to imagine what comes next for L.A. while they're still fighting the fires as we speak, but I think the question moving forward is how do we have a cleaner divide between the built human world and the natural world? How do we make it possible for more people to not live in the way of fire, when fire is increasingly part of our world, while still being connected to our natural surroundings? I mean, we had fires here in Massachusetts in the fall, so it’s becoming a feature of life everywhere as climate change worsens.
Ben: You write toward the end of the book, “As the 21st century wears on, it will become impossible to ignore the eternal truth that the earth sets the conditions and the only sensible path for humanity is to meet those terms with humility and grace.” Which I think is what you’re getting at and what makes a lot of the history in your book so relevant today.
KP: Thank you. I hope it serves to introduce a lot of people to the region who don't really know it. And also for folks from Albuquerque and Phoenix and so on, I think there's a lot of our histories we don't know ourselves.
Ben: I think you mean people from Albuquerque and Pumpkinville.
KP: Ha, yes—excuse me.
Great story about NYC water in Water for Gotham by Gerard Koeppel, I read it years ago when I started working for a consultant to the NYCDEP in the early 2000s and never forgot its message. He might have even referenced the paper you wrote for school in the book. IDK🤷🏼♂️
Enjoyed reading this, the impact of plentiful fresh drinking water on the growth on NYC can't be understated. One could argue that one of the tailwinds behind NYC's rapid growth has been its vast supply of clean drinking water. It amazes me roughly a century and half give or take in the past someone thought to secure the watershed to supply the city for generations to come.