Modernist Institutions, Modern Infrastructures, and the Making of the US-Mexico Borderlands

In 1927, Ansel Adams, Albert Bender, and Bertha Damon drove through the US-Mexico borderlands. While Bender was already a prominent patron of the arts, and while Damon was already an established environmental writer, Adams was at a creative crossroads. For most of his life, he had trained as a classical pianist, but recently, he had started to see himself as a professional photographer. On visits to Yosemite National Park, he had begun experimenting with “straight photography”—the sharply focused, richly detailed style for which he would become famous. Thanks to Bender’s patronage, he had just printed his first portfolio. Now, in Bender’s Buick, he was speeding toward Santa Fe—and a meeting with Mary Austin.[1]

Although she was not a canonical, capital “M” Modernist, Austin had contributed to several strands of “weak modernism.”[2] Before Adams was even born, she had drafted The Land of Little Rain (1903), an essay collection on the inhospitable environments east of the Sierra Nevada. When Adams was still a child, she had written The Arrow Maker (1911), a play based on Paiute traditions, and The Ford (1917), a novel about the California water wars. Finally, as Adams was reaching adulthood, she had published The American Rhythm (1923), a study of Native poetics. Over the course of her career, Austin had participated in the modernist coteries of London and New York, but since 1925, she had held court at her Casa Querida in Santa Fe. As a cofounder of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, a leader of the Indian Arts Fund, and a benefactress of the Santa Fe Little Theater, she was the perfect person to launch Adams into the art world. Fortunately, she took a liking to the young photographer, and over a plate of homemade donuts, she started thinking of essays that could contextualize—and, with any luck, commercialize—his work.[3]

For the next three years, Adams and Austin collaborated on a book called Taos Pueblo (1930). Along the way, they engaged with “modernist institutions”—a term I use for the social sites in which modernists made their media.[4] In many contexts, modernist institutions relied on public resources, but in the borderlands, they operated out of private homes. From Los Gallos, Mabel Dodge sponsored performances (especially the Fiesta de Santa Fe), organized exhibitions (particularly the Museum of New Mexico’s shows), and planned political campaigns (including, most famously, the effort to defeat the US Senate’s Bursum Bill) (figs. 1 and 2).[5] On Camino Monte Sol, Alice Corbin Henderson edited poetry anthologies (such as The Turquoise Trail, from 1928) and contributed to little magazines (such as Laughing Horse).[6] Finally, at El Delirio, Elizabeth and Martha White made a “women’s sphere,” a space for exploring alternative creativities and sexualities.[7] In their modernist institutions, these women hosted the likes of Witter Bynner, Willa Cather, Andrew Dasburg, Martha Graham, Marsden Hartley, D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Strand, Jean Toomer, and Edward Weston. However, they gave their guests more than just room and board; in Dodge’s grandiloquent terms, they made it possible to escape “the competitive life of civilization,” “become one with their surroundings,” and “live outside of Time.”[8]

Adams, Austin, and their counterparts came from disparate contexts. But since they worked in Los Gallos and La Casa Querida (the two modernist institutions that form the focus of this essay), they developed similar strategies for depicting and dwelling in the borderlands. Like many twentieth-century culture-makers, they used projections of “primitive” peoples to alleviate anxieties about “civilization.”[9] Unlike most of their contemporaries, they embedded these projections in specific sites of settler colonialism. According to María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, the United States’ and Mexico’s “encounters with Indigeneity” have shaped the ways in which they “perceive the natural landscape.” [10] For this reason, New Mexico modernists could not redefine human cultures without also redefining nonhuman environments. As they appropriated Native and Nuevomexicana/o traditions, they started associating deserts with authenticity and spirituality. And as they treated racialized communities as precapitalist utopias, they began thinking that deserts had essential and enduring values. With the media that they made in their institutions, these modernists relied on and reaffirmed a “racial geography,” which Saldaña-Portillo defines as a way “of envisioning, of mapping, of accounting for and representing space as Indian given” (Indian Given, 17). Sometimes, this racial geography seemed superficially aesthetic; in Hartley’s paintings, it manifested itself as little more than abstract form and vibrant color. Other times, it seemed deeply spiritual; in Lawrence’s essays, it “liberated [people from] civilisation” and “changed [their lives] forever.”[11] At all times, it enforced inarticulable yet all-important expectations about human identity in/on the more-than-human world.

How did New Mexico modernists reimagine and reshape the borderlands? For a long time, scholars saw Los Gallos and La Casa Querida as utopias that were separate from and superior to the rest of society.[12] But in the last twenty years, scholars have resituated these modernist institutions amidst the regional tourist industry. By analyzing the all-encompassing “Myth of Santa Fe,” scholars have shown how Los Gallos and La Casa Querida masked longstanding socioeconomic inequalities.[13] However, they have not recognized that these modernist institutions also concealed the proliferating phenomena that I refer to collectively as “modern infrastructures.” In this period, settlers consolidated their control of the borderlands—they invented new racial frameworks, imposed the English language, and made New Mexico and Arizona into the last of the lower forty-eight states.[14] With help from the Homestead Act, the Desert Lands Act, and many extralegal practices, they seized almost all of the fertile lands.[15] Then, under the authority of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Corps of Engineers, and state agencies, they redesigned most of the region’s watersheds.[16] For many Euro Americans, these modern infrastructures were profitable. But for most Natives and Nuevomexicana/os—and for almost all plants and animals—they were devastating. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, New Mexico modernists sought sustainable solutions to capitalist dispossession and ecological degradation. But with their racial geography, they made it harder to respond to—or even recognize—socio-ecological struggles. By embellishing the myth of tricultural harmony, they covered up conflicts over Native and Nuevomexicana/o lands. And by depicting deserts as unchanging or unchangeable, they helped hide the world’s most extensive (and indeed, most destructive) network of aqueducts, dams, and reservoirs.

This essay explores the relationships between modernist institutions, modern infrastructures, and racialization. While it invokes many modernist media, it focuses on Taos Pueblo. Throughout their careers, Adams and Austin advocated for environmental awareness.[17] But when they worked at Los Gallos and La Casa Querida, they entrenched environmental unconsciousness—an aesthetic, conceptual, and ethical framework that obscured the transformation of the borderlands. To read environmental unconsciousness, this essay uses the methods that Robert Higney discusses in “Institutional Picaresque”: like Jeremy Braddock’s Collecting as Modernist Practice or Harris Feinsod’s The Poetry of the Americas, it analyzes the institutions that make literature, art, and culture.[18] At the same time, this essay adopts the approach that John Durham Peters calls “Infrastructuralism”: like Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network or Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, it reveals the imaginary and material actors that “stand under our worlds.”[19] By working at the intersections of modernist studies, media studies, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities, this essay shows how radical forms of aesthetic pleasure disguised—and thereby deepened—a racialized regime of “environmentality.”[20] Ultimately, it argues that modernist institutions were entangled with modern infrastructures: while dams and aqueducts gave writers and artists the resources that they needed to work, texts and images made it possible for publics to ignore environmental problems.

Making Taos Pueblo

The story of Taos Pueblo (the book) does not begin in Taos Pueblo (the place); it begins with a conflict among modernist and mass cultural institutions. In 1928, Adams and Austin decided to work with Acoma Pueblo, but that summer, they struggled to navigate a crowded “cultural field.”[21] First, they heard a rumor that Robert Flaherty (the writer-director behind Nanook of the North) was “buy[ing] up all [of Acoma Pueblo’s] camera rights.”[22] Later, they learned that “The Famous Players” (predecessors to Paramount Pictures) were “connect[ing] the idea of large payments with photographs in the minds of the Acomas.”[23] To Adams and Austin, these “moving picture people” posed practical problems —they “gummed up” the streets, cut off the sightlines, and so on.[24] Even worse, they epitomized the mass media. That fall, therefore, the modernists distinguished their project. Whereas Flaherty “seem[ed] to know very little about Indians,” Austin claimed to have the highest standards of “workmanship.”[25] And whereas the Famous Players were shooting a single “Hollywood Indian Play,” Adams became “eager to see similar books on several Pueblos – Zuni – Acoma – Hopi – etc.”[26]

Through their distinctions, Austin and Adams strengthened modernist institutions and, in the process, reinforced modernist ways of relating to and residing in the borderlands. Like the “salvage ethnographers” who were using new media to save “Vanishing Indians,” Austin and Adams tried to transform dynamic communities into a static set.[27] In contrast to their counterparts, they believed that their books were “bound to increase in value . . . as changes [took] place in the Pueblos.”[28] By using the word “value,” Austin and Adams seized the economic and cultural capital that was swirling around modernist institutions. Of course, they recognized that they were creating commodities; indeed, when they started selling Taos Pueblo, they tried “not to sell out” so that they could “wait until the series [was] further along, and then raise the price.”[29] More importantly, they felt like they were making Modernist Art; in their correspondence, they maintained that their “taste” was “superior” and that their “set” had “unique value and beauty.”[30] With these two forms of “value,” Austin and Adams broke the bonds between Native realities and settler representations. Rather than documenting a people and a place, they designed a book. And rather than partnering with a public museum, they sold to private art collectors. In a consummate modernist move, they “Made It New”: as they experimented with new aesthetic forms, and as they exploited a new class of collectors, they shaped a new racial geography.

To take his photographs, Adams visited the region’s most important modernist institution: Mabel Dodge and Tony Lujan’s Los Gallos. From Dodge, Adams received a place to live; through Lujan, who was a Taos Indian, he got permission to work in Taos Pueblo. In 1929, Adams took his photographs. That fall, Austin wrote her essay. Finally, that winter, the Grabhorn Press designed the book. Throughout the publication process, Adams “worked like a steam-engine,” but in the end, his efforts paid off. [31] With Taos Pueblo, Adams announced his arrival as a professional photographer: in 1930, he shared the first prints with Paul Strand; in 1932, he showed the finished book to Alfred Stieglitz; and on the basis of his burgeoning network, he co-founded Group f/64 and co-authored a manifesto for straight photography. In these and other respects, Adams relied on and reaffirmed modernist institutions.[32] However, he also drew on and contributed to modern infrastructures. By analyzing Taos Pueblo’s ways of engaging with—or, to put it more precisely, not engaging with—these infrastructures, we can rewrite a chapter in the literary and artistic history of the borderlands.

Taos Pueblo’s Environmental Unconsciousness

Take a look at Taos Pueblo (figs. 3 and 4). Admire the leather binding, the cloth cover, and the embossed title. Appreciate the beautiful typography and the custom-made paper. Finally, read the first few lines: “Dedicated to our friends at Taos Pueblo to whose interested & intelligent cooperation is owed the historic and human authenticity of this book.”[33] With each of these elements, Austin and Adams paid their respects to a human community and its nonhuman environment. In the process, they pushed back against the prevailing forms of primitivism. Whereas Cather set her novels in Panther Canyon, the Cliff City, and other imaginary spaces, Austin tried to write an “authentic” account of a particular place. In turn, whereas Edward Curtis forced his Native subjects into artificial poses and anachronistic costumes, Adams attempted to “cooperate” with his Pueblo “friends.”[34] To some extent, Austin and Adams lived up to their lofty ideals.[35] But for the most part, they failed to recognize that Taos Indians were still resisting settler colonialism and that Taos Pueblo was still confronting modern environmentality. Because they lived and worked in modernist institutions, they could not see the world-making power of the modern state.

To understand how Taos Pueblo (the place) differed from Taos Pueblo (the book), consider the following photographs of Tony Lujan. The first is an unsigned, untitled, and undated snapshot of a hunting expedition. The second is Ansel Adams’s “A Man of Taos” (figs. 5 and 6).

In the snapshot, Lujan blurred the boundaries between the primitive and the modern: beneath a traditional cloak, he wore a shirt and tie, and to display a dead deer, he used the hood of a car. In Philip Deloria’s terms, he was an “Indian in unexpected places”: by combining elements of Native and settler societies, he demonstrated that “the world we inhabit is the shared creation of all peoples.”[36] While it is unlikely, it is possible that Austin or Adams took this snapshot: after all, both figures had “unexpected” experiences in Lujan’s car. As Austin noted in her autobiography, Lujan was an “exceptionally good driver.”[37] Whereas the “average American” was merely “the master of [a] car’s mechanisms,” Lujan turned cars into “extension[s] of his personality” (Austin, Earth Horizon, 355). By singing the “accentless melodies of his people” atop the “unaccented rhythms of [his] machine,” he “sail[ed] on a magic carpet along the floor of space.” On one of these “magic” rides, Lujan landed in San Francisco (355). As Adams recalled, he started “singing and loudly beating his resonant drum. In no time at all neighbors and children living blocks away were drawn by the insistent throb and the guttural chants (Adams and Alinder, Autobiography, 92). For a few “extraordinary” moments, Lujan created an “incongruous happening in a conventional setting.” But then he stepped into Adams’s studio—and into New Mexico modernism’s racial geography.

In the portrait, Lujan became a capital-M “Man” who stood in for all of “Taos.” Shrouded in a dark robe and standing against a dark background, he remediated the primitivist fantasies at the heart of Lawrence’s “Taos” (1923) (in which Taos Indians wrapped “themselves in their sheets like shrouds”) and Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) (in which a Lujan-like character wore “a blanket of the finest wool and design”).[38] As the light fell across his angular nose and deeply-lined cheeks, Lujan allowed Adams to practice his photographic technique; indeed, as Brian Hochman argues, many Natives drove changes in media technology.[39] But while he had a measure of control over Adams’s photographs, Lujan had less influence on Austin’s essay.[40] According to Austin, Taos Indians maintained their “tribal integrity” (4). Positively, this meant that they were “proud” and “rebellious,” but pejoratively, it meant that they “share[d] Mongolian affiliations with all the [of the supposed] Amerind race” (4). By this racist logic, Taos Indians had inherent (read: inferior) characteristics: their faces had “the enigmatic fixity of Chinese dolls,” their language had “Chinese tonalities,” and their hairstyle was “as ancient as Thibet” (4). Within Los Gallos, La Casa Querida, and other modernist institutions, Taos Indians were not active subjects with whom one might form real relationships; instead, they were passive objects onto which one could project primitivist fantasies.

If “A Man of Taos” redefined identity, then “Ruins of Old Church (Destroyed 1847)” reimagined history (fig. 7). With its title the photograph evoked—but refused to explain—the “double colonization” of the borderlands.[41] Of course, almost all viewers can guess that Spanish missionaries built the “church” in question. However, almost none can tell how or why US soldiers “destroyed” it in “1847.” That year, Natives and Nuevomexicanas/os rebelled against the United States. In January, they broke up Anglo-owned businesses, defeated US militia units, and killed the territorial governor. But in February, they retreated toward Taos. On the third, with the regular army in pursuit, the rebels barricaded themselves in the church. After a few hours of fighting, the refuge became a tomb; artillery blasted a hole in the adobe walls, sappers set fire to the wooden roof, and soldiers scattered grapeshot into the tightly packed rebel forces. By the end of the fourth, the building was in ruins, and two hundred men, women, and children lay dead.[42]

With the words “Ruins of Old Church (Destroyed in 1847),” Adams summoned the specters of Spanish missionaries, US soldiers, and Native rebels. But through his artistic techniques—his razor-sharp focus, his wide tonal range, and his complex composition—he submitted these specters to a modernist exorcism. The photograph is stunning: a picturesque ruin rises against massive mountains, a rock-strewn road runs by a ramshackle cemetery, and vaguely, in the distance, a tall tree stands over a prosperous house. Like much of Adams’s work, it is a study in light: the sunny church and the even sunnier house contrast with the dark mountains, and the white crosses emerge from the obscure shadows. To top off, the clouds are rendered so precisely that they start to seem surreal; like the snow falling on Cather’s Cliff City, they make it clear that reality has been refracted through a modernist lens. In each of these respects, the photograph is less about colonialism than it is about creativity; “Give me any ‘old church,’” it seems to say, “and I’ll give you a modernist masterpiece.” For Adams, therefore, Taos Pueblo might as well have been Half Dome, El Capitan, or some other rock formation; in every case, he would have fixated on form, light, and other aesthetic qualities.

While Adams reimagined particular points in time, Austin redefined time itself. Along with other settlers in the territory claimed by the United States, Austin established and maintained “temporal sovereignty,” which Mark Rifkin defines as a culturally conditioned “way of narrating, conceptualizing, and experiencing temporality.”[43] Consider the following passage:

It is the fact of Taos rather than its history which intrigues public interest. The fact of its persistence, sturdily unimpaired of its essential primitiveness, its vital pagan quality, gathering to itself the nostalgia of house-bred, book-fed peoples; this is the charm of Taos, its excuse and justification. There it stands like a tree, like the fabled tree of its Creation legend . . . a tree watered by hidden springs of whose waters our own sap is long unattainted (6).

Throughout the passage—and indeed, throughout the essay—Austin distinguished herself from “house-bred, book-fed peoples.” In the end, though, she used the twisted temporalities of Los Gallos, La Casa Querida, and other modernist institutions. Despite their differences, all of these institutions divided Native “fact” and settler “history.” In their eyes, Natives appeared to be part of a deep and distant past: even when they adopted new technologies, they preserved an “essential primitiveness,” and even when they copied other cultures, they sustained some “vital pagan quality.” In contrast, settlers seemed able to shift between past and present: when they were stressed, they could visit the “primitive hearth of society,” but after they “repolarize[d],” they could “ascend” back into modernity (5). With this regime of temporal sovereignty, the modernist institutions appropriated Taos Pueblo’s “creation legend”: where “hidden springs” once “water[ed]” a Native community, they started slaking the thirst of settler society. Ultimately, the modernist institutions had it both ways: while the real Taos Pueblo paid modernity’s costs, the imaginary Taos Pueblo offered pre-modernity’s benefits.

Unimaginable Infrastructures

In the borderlands, modern infrastructures have developed alongside modernist institutions: on the one hand, bureaucrats and businessmen have built a “coercive . . .  system” based on the “large-scale manipulation of water,” and on the other hand, writers and artists helped their publics ignore—and thereby intensify—environmental problems (Worster, Rivers of Empire, 5). In works like Taos Pueblo, this form of environmental unconsciousness became so immersive that it started to seem invisible—it shimmered on the surfaces of photographs, lurked between lines of prose, and clung to finely bound books. In other modernist media, it emerged much more explicitly.

As a closing example of the way modernist institutions concealed modern infrastructures, consider Austin’s late articles on water in the west (1925–27).[44] While they continued longstanding critiques of California’s water policies, these articles championed the Colorado River Compact—and with it, the world’s most invasive dams, aqueducts, and other water infrastructures.[45] To Austin, “the Southwest” represented the “last opportunity for the rise of a superior English-speaking culture” (Austin, “Colorado River Controversy,” 512). On the one hand, the region had the right racial “stock”: instead of the “Blackman” or the “Bushman,” it had the “stable” “Spanish” the “prepotent” “Indian” (Austin, “Colorado River Project,” 113–14). On the other hand, the region offered an ideal ecological niche: along its aqueducts, the “mass of people” could have “intimate contact . . . with a varied natural environment (114–15).” With these perspectives from scientific racism and environmental determinism, Austin predicted that the Southwest would become an “Indivisible Utility”: as “seven states and the federal government” redesigned the Colorado River, they would establish and maintain a “standing mandate of cooperation.”[46] As she developed her infrastructural imaginary, Austin made some good points, and in her invocation of Native and Nuevomexicana/o “mother ditches,” she anticipated contemporary environmental justice initiatives.[47] In the end, though, she did not realize that water infrastructures were exacerbating socio-ecological struggles. Worse, she did not recognize that her utopian fantasies were obscuring a dystopian reality. As Natives and Nuevomexicanas/os fought for survival, Austin made it seem like they would suffer an “inevitable slow decline” (Austin, “Indivisible Utility,” 304). And as the Colorado River ran wild, she accepted that it would transform “into irrigation ditches and hydroelectric power” (Austin, “Colorado River Controversy,” 512).

How can we read Austin’s late articles? More broadly, how can we theorize relationships between modernist institutions, modern infrastructures, and racialization? To answer these questions, we need to chart new courses for ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Even in their best work, ecocritics tend to link literary texts to the prevailing forms of progressive politics; thus, while Ursula K. Heise’s “eco-cosmopolitans” would fit into Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, Rob Nixon’s “writer-activists” could join most environmental justice movements.[48] As these scholars demonstrate, literature has helped us love places we have never been and care for creatures we have never met. As I am arguing, however, literature has also allowed us to disguise (or disregard) our use (and abuse) of our planet. To prepare for our precarious future, we must tell both of these stories in their indissoluble interdependence. Even as we raise environmental awareness, we must reckon with environmental unconsciousness.