On Tuesday, Aug. 7, Collected Works Bookstore hosts a reading by author, performer and award-winning journalist Rubén Martinez of his new book Desert America . ---
At the center of the book, Martinez focuses on the time he spent in Espanõla Valley with his wife Angela Garcia, an author and anthropologist. Over several years, Martinez collected stories of life and loss while his wife conducted research on heroine addiction. From the research that Garcia collected during her time in Espanõla, she went on to publish the PEN Center USA Award-winning book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande .
Desert America tells the story of the economic boom during the 2000s, and its tragic descent into the great recession. Martinez articulates this change through the varied communities in the American West and its respective borderlands. What Martinez finds in his explorations of the people in these regions are some striking, and sometimes polarizing, ways of life. To pull a quote from the book’s description: “[It] evokes a new world of extremes: outrageous wealth and devastating poverty, sublime beauty and ecological ruin.” This world of extremes is explored in other areas of the West including Joshua Tree National Park in California and Marfa, Texas.
Martinez’ writing has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, The Nation, Spin, Sojourners and Mother Jones. He is a Lannan Foundation Fellowship recipient in nonfiction and he won an Emmy Award for hosting PBS-affiliate KCET-TV’s Life & Times .
SFR: What was your source of inspiration for tackling the particular subjects in Desert America?
Rubén Martinez: It was a very personal project. I arrived at Joshua Tree, California under very difficult circumstances in the winter of 1997. I had been living and working in Mexico City and was past the deadline on a book. I was broke, and I was doing a lot of drugs. I destroyed all of my personal relationships. A very close friend of mine was part of an art community [there] and that’s where I went to get my life back together, and that is where the book begins––I began a period of ten years living in the borderlands. The book begins with me trying to get my life back together and trying to live in these other settings, and noticing I wasn’t the only one in trouble in that landscape.
What can people expect from the lecture?
I’ll be talking about the larger themes of the book. “The boom and bust in the new old West.” I’m using that term to describe the economic crisis of the last decade as a way to experience the desert west.
In what ways are the vast disparities that you encountered redefining the idea of America?
When I say boom and bust, I’m using the term because of the way it’s associated historically with the notion of the American west. What I’m talking about here is that the economic expansion of the 2000s left a lot of people out. In other words, the boom was a bust even at its peak. The essential theme is the brutality of capitalism in the desert west. There’s an extreme form of capitalism in the west––extremes of wealth and extremes of poverty, which brings out drugs which I was surrounded by in the areas that I lived in while researching this book.
Which contemporary writers do you consider to be particularly significant?
I have a trinity. There are three writers that have had a direct influence on me: James Baldwin, Joan Didion and Richard Rodriguez. All three of those writers make a connection between personal experience and historical context. They are the writers that I’m humbly trying to emulate.
Any final thoughts?
The bottom line of this book is that I’m trying to capture the roller-coaster ride that people have been through in this economy. The heart of the book takes place in northern New Mexico in Velarde, in the heart of the Española Valley––a valley of extreme poverty, and a lot of homes with drugs. And it happens to be surrounded by three of richest communities in the country.
