Memory and Architecture

11: Profaning Sacred Space: Los Angeles in New Mexico

chapter eleven Profaning Sacred Space Los Angeles in New Mexico V. B. PRICE “What we do anywhere matters, but especially here,” Edith Warner wrote in her journals at Otowi Crossing, New Mexico, in 1933. The owner of a celebrated tea shop, traveler’s inn, post office, and supper refuge for the scientists of the Manhattan Project, Edith Warner is the quintessential New Mexican. She loved the land and its people so deeply, she accepted responsibility to nurture and respect what she loved. She continued in her journal, “Mesas, mountains, rivers and trees, winds and rains are as sensitive to the actions and thoughts of humans as we are to their forces. They take into themselves what we give off, and give it out again. I wonder if it is my hatred and fear that turned the cedars brown and if the tumbleweeds ate my thoughts of some people.”1 People who have identified with New Mexico tend to have thoughts like Edith Warner’s, though rarely so eloquently put. Moving into an old railroad building on the Rio Grande in the late 1920s, living within walking distance of her friends in San Ildefonso Pueblo at the bottom of the “hill” in the Jemez Mountains that would eventually become the site of Los Alamos, Warner felt she had come home to New Mexico, even though her birthplace was in Pennsylvania. She endured many changes in her more than twenty-five years at Otowi, including the fantastic growth that took place around Los Alamos and in the Española Valley during World War II.| 269 She wrote in a Christmas letter in 1951, “How to endure the manmade devastating period in which we live and which seems almost as hopeless to control as drought; how to proceed when leadership seems utterly lacking, when individuals and nations seem stupid and arrogant; these no one human can answer.”2 These are the same kinds of questions that have plagued many New Mexicans during their state’s phenomenal growth since the end of the war. In the 1970s, New Mexicans used to call such growth “Californication.” Now we call it sprawl, like everyone else. But disrespect by another name stings the same. And the pain is more than what those catchphrases can convey. When you live in a state of under one million people and watch it more than double in population in a little more than forty years, disrespectful growth comes to seem like an unstoppable disease. To this species of economic and stylistic colonialism that comes with rapid change, nothing matters but expansion. 270 | V. B. Price fig. 11.1. Albuquerque—canal, at the Nature Center, looking south. Photo by Mark Forte, 2004. The landmarks and civil comforts of your home place turn over every three years or so in a dizzying future shock, especially if your downtown historic buildings have been demolished by urban renewal and replaced with a succession of fad and generic structures. Fundamentally, such disorientation comes about not only by erasing historic memory, but by taking suburbanism into what for many people is the holy land of the New Mexico high desert, and forcing the oases of New Mexico towns and cities to be desiccated by the asphalt, junk-building world of Californicated mall culture. Those who think of New Mexico as their homeland, and that includes, in my book, everyone who identifies with the spiritual and familial magnetism of the landscape, personally mourn the obliviating changes that come with that kind of growth. It offends our memory of what peace and majesty mean as defining qualities of New Mexican sacred space. Something precious to us has been profaned. In its simplest sense, to profane a natural or human place of spiritual power is to deny its potency, treat it with disdain, and victimize it. In order to exploit, one must first devalue. Tyrants dehumanize opponents, callous land speculators denigrate the very landscape they want to sell and “improve.” Profaning Sacred Space | 271 fig. 11.2. Albuquerque, looking cross I-40, toward the volcanoes. Photo by Mark Forte, 2004. People all over the world continually experience the helpless misery of witnessing beloved places, icons, and venerable ways of life degraded into mere objects of opinion or spaces of exploitation. As Edith Warner would say, exploiters do not think that New Mexico really matters to anyone. New Mexico is starting to forget the meaning and value of places...