Desert America: Boom
and Bust in the New Old by Rubén Martínez is a difficult book to summarize
in a short review.
Martinez is a
journalist of Hispanic ancestry, and he is fascinated by the borderlands between
the US and Mexico in all its guises.
Martinez is fixated by identity, and probably the most interesting
part of the book is his observations about life in northern New Mexico among
Hispanos, the descendants of the first Spanish settlers in the area, Anglos,
and more recent Mexican arrivals.
How one finds a place, a home, becomes a slippery, often
dangerous venture in Northern New Mexico, and Martinez is not shy in examining the fault lines among these communities; they all have needs
and agendas that are often at odds.
There is a prickly sense about change, and who it benefits and who it
leaves behind.
Martinez has his own demons, and is both attracted and
repelled by the landscapes of the desert south, its people and their problems; he never feels
comfortable in one group.
As a man without
a home in the figurative and (often) literal sense, he has more in common with many of us, regardless of our ethnic
background, than he may think. We all
suffer from these post-modern dislocations.
We are all adrift and lost in this need to find a model of self and
place where we fit. So many of us fail to find it.
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