Viewpoint: Latino Vernaculars and the Emerging National Landscape

The first article in the first issue of Landscape appeared in the spring of 1951 under the title “Chihuahua as We Might Have Been.” Contemplating natural and built environments on a broad scale of time and place, J. B. Jackson interpreted adjacent landscapes along the U.S.–Mexico border. “Topography, climate, vegetation, the very quality of the sunlight and distance and solitude are the same north of the border and south,” he observed. “So they were made to be one and the same, Chihuahua and west Texas and New Mexico, and they were thought of as one by the people who lived north and south—until the line was drawn. Now there are two Southwests, or rather a Mexican Northwest and our own Southwest, related but no longer identical.”¹

Jackson surveyed the divided landscape, describing the features that distinguished each half. He made note of their divergent patterns of land tenure, differing choices of building materials, disparate fencing practices, and dissimilar methods of irrigation. But what most occupied his attention was their distinctive geographies of human habitation. Unlike in the United States, the Mexican society to the south “built towns and cities in considerable number, but it has only begun to formulate its own characteristic countryside.” Accordingly, “Chihuahua has more towns of over ten thousand inhabitants than New Mexico and Arizona, and they are not sleepy market towns, either.” On the contrary, he called them “bona fide Chihuahuan . . . they have a character very much their own: detached from the countryside, self-contained, and, within limits, remarkably urban.” This consistent pattern of settlement demonstrated that the people of northern Mexico displayed “a partiality for city life.”²

This was classic J. B. Jackson: a characteristically bold and sweeping interpretation of a whole region, and one that set forth the basic epistemology for an entire field of study. He proposed that each of the Southwest’s “two distinct human landscapes” was “the expression of a different kind of society” and remarked: “It is as if two different sets of laws, two distinct psychologies, were at work.” Jackson thus offered an early and elegant statement of the foundational assumption that underlies our work—the idea that people reveal themselves most clearly through the built environment and that therefore our homes, places of work and play, neighborhoods, and cities have a great deal to tell us about the human condition. He also elaborated on the question of what factors determined the shape of a landscape. Jackson clearly did not believe that “society” could be understood simply in terms of the aggregated influences of climate, geology, economy, and technology. He did the hard work of considering the imperatives of mining, ranching, and farming and their water and labor requirements, but these were not the things he thought decisive in the broadest sense. “I cannot believe,” he wrote, “that such explanations, practical though they are, really account for the concentration in towns.” Rather, his interpretive framework inclined toward culture, that less tangible but no less influential congeries of people’s customs, preferences, and ideas about themselves. Foregrounding human agency while still recognizing the limitations on that agency, he concluded simply: “The kind of architecture a group prefers—when it has any choice in the matter—can be very revealing of the group’s temperament.”³

“Chihuahua as We Might Have Been” is more than sixty years old, but it is more relevant now than ever because it helps us address one of the most pressing needs in the fields of cultural landscape studies, vernacular architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and cultural resource management: understanding and working with the spaces produced by Latinos, the fastest-growing demographic group in the United States.⁴ Jackson postulated the existence of a landscape that, while specific to northern Mexico, also represented a more generalized spatial culture created by people who “think and act . . . as Latins.”⁵ He also indicated that we could find evidence of this kind of landscape at every scale, from the microlevel materiality of furniture and dwelling style to the macrogeography of concentrated or dispersed settlement.

In the decades since...