book reviews – C.M. Mayo's Book Notes & Convos

From the Archives: A Review of “Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West” by Rubén Martínez

BY C.M. MAYO — March 8, 2022
UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).

This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library.
> For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here.
P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.

The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, that’s for the newsletter.

DESERT AMERICA:
Boom and Bust in the New Old West
by Rubén Martínez
Metropolitan Books, 2012
Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in The Washington Independent Review of Books, February 18, 2013

What is the West? That cross-borderly mashup of music, footwear and haberdashery known as “cowboy cool”? Or is it indigenous? The Big Empty, healing refuge, Hispano, Chicano, Mexicano? Or is it now found in the scrim of “underwater” water-sucking tract houses? What is this landscape, if not seen through millions of different eyes each with its own needs, lusts, filters and projections? And how is it changing? (Radically.) In Desert America Rubén Martínez tackles these immense and thorny questions in a narrative of multiple strands masterfully braided into a lyrical whole.

A memoir of living and traveling through both iconic and off-the-path places from Joshua Tree to Sedona, the Arizona borderlands to the heroin-infested farming communities of New Mexico and, briefly, the artist colony of Marfa, Texas, Desert America is also the story of a son and grandson of Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants trying on and struggling with various identities —guitar-toting “brown cowboy”; Roque Dalton-quoting poet-activist; addict, farmer, husband, father. But more: Desert America is a work of literary journalism in the finest tradition, a novelesque interweaving of vivid and telling detail with interviews and original research.

In the chapter “Water in the Desert,” Martínez profiles Mike Wilson, a member of the Tohono O’odham reservation, who makes a spiritual practice of leaving gallon jugs of water in the Baboquivari Valley, a deathtrap of thirst for uncounted hundreds of migrants. Not far from Wilson’s house are tract houses for a different kind of migrant — many of whom take a dim view of Wilson’s endeavor. Wilson named his various depots after the Gospels. After an exhausting day of following him around, writes Martínez:

“John Station is in the sun-dappled shade of a mesquite thicket, and with all the splashing from the ten-gallons containers and the hoses, soon there are diamonds of light glinting on every surface, drops of water whose brilliance disappears within seconds as the blazing air sucks the moisture away.”

Later, Martínez joins Wilson and a party of Guatemalans in a search for the body of a teenager named Sergio, whose cousin Lucas, residing in San Diego, learned had died two days into his journey from the border. In the car on the way to where they will start the search, Martínez learns that Sergio was 19. He was overweight; he carried a fake Mexican birth certificate. In Guatemala he’d driven a bus and gone into debt for the privilege. A husband and father already, he’d come north for fast cash. His body, Lucas had been told, “was left at the foot of a tree in a wash next to the highway to Arizona City, near a cemetery.” But after a brutal day of searching micro patches of immensity, Wilson, who knew the desert, said, at last, and in good Spanish, “Do you know how many places that could be?”

On the flip side of the coin, with “a postcard view of Baboquivari Peak,” on “640 acres of stunning Sonoran desert” is “a handsome house, 1920s vintage with Moroccan arches, tall ceilings and an exquisitely tiled kitchen,” where Martínez interviews its owner, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and carries a shotgun. Apart from the menace of rattlesnakes, migrants cross her land. At night, from the house, she can hear the rumbling of the Border Patrol SUVs.

“She visualizes them coming down the saddle between the two hills behind the ranch house. Walking up to the house, up to the bedroom window, peering in at her.

‘You must understand, Rubén. These are not Juan and María.’ They are, she says, like feral dogs.

I tense. There is a great contradiction between us, in the way we imagine who is on the land. Who is the figure crossing the desert?”

In “Where the River Bends,” Martínez arrives in Texas’ Big Bend country, to the tiny town of Marfa as a Lannan Fellow, assigned one of their several beautifully refurbished writers’ residences. He covers the basics of the art colony’s history as well if not better than anyone: the filming of the iconic Elizabeth Taylor-Rock Hudson-James Dean vehicle, “Giant”; the arrival of visionary artist Donald Judd, “mad emperor of the rectangles filled with the soul-stirring vistas of the Chihuhuan Desert,” and then, on Judd’s heels, the jet-in multimillionaires in search of space and creatives displacing the old ranching families. But more than a personal memoir or press release-fed bit of travel section fluff, Martínez delves in, hiking with Jeff Fort, ex-Tyco CEO who bought Judd’s fabled Chinati Hot Springs, among other and vast properties; and, recounted with often painful detail, Martínez attends a party at a sleek mansion surrounded by an ocean of plains and mountain views. And more: he looks into Marfa’s Blackwell School, which was the Mexican school — for Marfa’s public schools were not integrated until 1965. That famous scene in “Giant,” where Rock Hudson gets punched out by the waiter who had refused to serve Mexicans, was, alas, based on an ugly reality.

There are myriad ugly realities in the new West — migrants perishing in the deserts, unsustainable sprawl, conflicts, poverty, an epidemic of addiction — and while Martínez explores these, yielding powerful insight into the changing mosaic of peoples, he also shows us the magnet that is the West’s breathtaking beauty. And it all makes a symphony of sense. As Martínez writes in his introduction, “the only way to tell my story, it seemed, was to tell theirs.”

I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Journal of Big Bend Studies: “The Secret Book by Francisco I. Madero”

Edna Ferber’s Giant & A Selection of Related Books,
Plus Two Related Videos On (Yes) the Nuremberg Trials

From the Archives:
A Review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire

The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut by James McWilliams

BOOK REVIEW by C.M. Mayo

The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut
by James McWilliams
The University of Texas Press, 2013
ISBN 978-0-292-74916-0
Hardcover pp. 192

Crisply entertaining and chock-full of crunchy research by a food historian, this apparently delicious little book on America’s native nut— (and isn’t the cover charming?)— is a horror story.

It opens, as the darkest do, with a sunny scene of innocence. Clustered along river bottoms in what would one day become Texas, groves of pecan trees rained down their bounty for wildlife and indigenous peoples. For centuries, pecans were their superfood, dense with calories and nutrition. In the 16th century, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the conquistador who shipwrecked en route to Florida and wandered west, found the Guadalupe River “a river of nuts”— although he had no word for them but “walnut.” The name “pecan” dates from the late 18th century.

Those are not pecan trees at Monticello.

The pecan did not do well further north. Thomas Jefferson planted some 200 pecan trees in Monticello; none survive. Where nuts were wanted, European walnut varieties proved more popular and versatile, so the pecan was left to do what it had always done, thrive in its wild state along river bottoms, mainly in what is today Texas. Notes McWilliams, “unlike any other fruit-bearing tree in the age of cultivation, the pecan managed to evade the cultivating hand of man for centuries after humans began exploiting it for food.”

In the nineteenth century, as ranching and cash crops such as cotton, corn and wheat spread across the South and Midwest, many pecan trees disappeared; nonetheless, a large number of pecan groves survived, especially in Texas, because they clung to riverbanks and bottoms, and proved able to survive a flood other crops could not.

Farmers found wild pecans not only delicious as snacks for themselves, but good pig feed, and bags of them, easily gathered, could be sold in new markets in San Antonio, Galveston, and New Orleans. In the second half of the 19th century, Texas took the lead in pecan production, but not from formal orchards; for the most part, farmers gathered wild pecans.

How to sell more pecans? The market wanted uniformity, thin shells, and dense nut meats. Even the most magnificent pecan tree’s seed, however, would not “come true,” that is, bring forth a tree producing equivalent quality nuts. The solution was grafting. As early as 1822 one Abner Landrum detailed his own successful experiments with pecan grafting in the American Farmer. It seems no farmer bothered to emulate that experiment. The market for pecans was still marginal and, as McWilliams ventures, “it was simply more macho to run a ranch with cattle than to turn that land over to pecans.”

In the mid-century 19th century, in the Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, a slave gardener named Antoine successfully grafted an orchard of more than 100 fabulously productive pecan trees. Decades later, the plantation’s new German owner, Herbert Bonzano, brought the nuts of those grafted pecans to Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exposition. And thus, like so many other fruits before it, the pecan was at last, if slowly, on the road to industrial production— a road, like that to Hell, paved with good intentions.

For a time, farmers relied on wild pecans, resisting experts’ advice to graft pecans, perhaps out of innate conservatism and a reluctance to becoming dependent on nurserymen. Attitudes soon changed. After a series of insect plagues in the last three decades of the 19th century decimated major cash crops, the USDA championed chemical insecticides that, “lo and behold, worked.” Writes McWilliams, “The USDA was no oracle, but as pecan farmers recognized, history showed it could make life much easier for those who tilled the soil for a living. So long as they would listen.” Listen they did.

The 20th century brought increasing industrialization in pecan production. After World War I, writes McWilliams, “pecan trees were becoming carefully managed commodities rather than natural aspects of the southern landscape.” As for shelling, an important source of employment in San Antonio in the 30s, after some labor unrest, this was given over to machines.

In World War II the U.S. government gave the pecan industry a push, promoting the nuts as nutritious replacements for meat; and after imposing price ceilings to help promote consumer demand, buying up millions of pounds of surplus pecans (many fed to schoolchildren). By the late 1940s, pecans were no longer holiday treats or just for pralines, they were in everything from cakes to cookies to pies, even salads. McWilliams: “The aristocrat of nuts had become a commoner.”

McWilliams brings the pecan through the rest of its 20th century history with mail order, frozen foods, processed foods, chain restaurants, granola, and ice cream; its oil extracted for lubricants in clocks and guns, its wood milled for basketball court flooring, its shells collected for mulch, barbecue chips, plywood, pesticides, and more. By 2011, when the author tours a Texan pecan farm, he is stuck with dark wonder:

“First, the entire operation is a streamlined model of mechanization. Vehicles designed to fit snugly between seemingly endless rows of perfectly aligned pecan trees spray pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides; they lay mulch, prune trees, apply fertilizer, and harvest nuts. Other machines disk the soil and smooth the turf between the trees so that fallen nuts do not elude harvest. At times helicopters are even brought in for the purpose of keeping frost from icing the nuts. Propane cannons are on hand to scare off crows. It occurred to me as we drove from orchard to orchard that there was nothing ‘natural’ about a contemporary pecan orchard. I was looking at a factory in the field.”

Oh, but it gets stranger. The money isn’t so much in the pecans as it is in shipping trees from the nursery to China. In 2001, Chinese did not have a word for pecan. Today pecans are a popular health food in China, available everywhere from airports to gas stations. It seems a question of time before the Chinese outstrip the U.S. in pecan production.

The future of the pecan, a “chemically saturated activity,” whether in the U.S. or China or elsewhere, looks grim. Arsenals of insecticides are increasingly necessary to combat aphids, beetles, weevils and more. These chemicals also threaten bees and other pollinators (and without them, our food supply as we know it may collapse). Plant diseases are also becoming increasingly resistant to chemical assault. The soil degrades. At some point— perhaps when China has become the top producer; perhaps when some insect or fungus has wiped out enough orchards; or in the wake of some ecological or economic jolt— it may become unprofitable to continue producing pecans in the U.S., the grafted and chemically attended ones for the mass market, that is.

What then will have become of the now few stands of wild pecans? The good intentions of many decades—ye olde single-minded “economic development”— have brought this once thriving wild nut tree to a state of such fragility that, concludes McWilliams, “we may well lose yet another natural thread to the past.”

Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America by Richard Parker

Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project:
Cynthia McAllister with the Buzz on the Bees

A Visit to El Paso’s “The Equestrian”

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

Bruce Berger’s “The End of the Sherry”

Blue collar and provincial Puerto Real in the police state that was Franco’s Spain might seem an unlikely venue for an amusing, eccentric, and very sensitive artist’s memoir. A graduate of Yale and a grad school drop out, pianist and writer Bruce Berger’s whole life seems unlikely, lived wildly out of sequence, and in The End of the Sherry, the Spanish chapters thereof beset by, in his words, “a curious passivity.” From the moment Berger washes up in a bar in Puerto Real, he and his beer-slurping dog drift and bob in the flow of happenstance. There are gigs with a rock band, a flash-in-the-pan career as a fishmonger, a pointless foray into Tangiers– yet always with sails set toward his true loves, music and writing.

I first came across Bruce Berger’s work in his travel memoir of Baja California, Almost an Island, and was enchanted by the beauty of his language, his courage in always pushing past clichés, and, best of all, his scrumptiously puckish sense of humor. Yes, I laughed out loud a lot in reading The End of the Sherry, too, and shook my head in wonder at the strangeness of his adventures and enthusiasms, and prodigious talent for cross-cultural friendships. Masterfully poetic, this belated coming-of-age / travel memoir throws a weird and wonderful lava-lamp light on his other works, even while standing solidly on its own, an exemplar of those genres.

In sum, a five star read.