Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews (review)

How are our lives tied to the place we inhabit? What are the natural divisions that exist among us? What unites us? What was it like to grow up close to the Continental Divide during the Great Depression? How did the New Deal unfold in New Mexico? Looking forward, how do we live within our common habitat?

These are the questions addressed in an anthology of sixteen interviews that coincided with an exhibit, Between Fences, sponsored by the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street program. The traveling exhibit arrived in New Mexico with a verdant bent that reflected its origins in the humid eastern United States. The New Mexico Humanities Council (NMHC), the exhibit’s local cosponsor, arranged a response in keeping with the arid region west of the hundredth meridian.

The body of the book consists of a series of edited interviews (and interview excerpts). Some are from aural historian and radio producer Jack Loeffler’s personal interview archive; others, he recorded for the purpose of the book. Some interviews are oral history—first-person testimony—while others are topical dialogues between Loeffler and a wide range of experts. (The final contributor opted to submit an essay in place of Loeffler’s inclusion of a past interview transcript.)

The interviews in Part I examine different groups in New Mexico—Hispano, Apache, Navajo, Pueblo, and Anglo. Their history, language, and creation stories are tied intimately to physical surroundings.

Part II examines the New Deal in New Mexico—a time when people united for mutual survival. The interviewees conduct an inventory of the many projects of the New Deal. The jobs offered changed individuals’ lives, built much of the young state’s infrastructure, and the results live on today.

Part III’s interviews draw on the past and present in order to best determine how to dwell with other cultural groups and animal species in a common habitat. The nineteenth-century resource exploitation has been scaled back in the face of drought, species scarcity, and climate change.

Loeffler’s sequence of interviews unfolds gracefully. An anecdote or concept raised during one interview is expanded in the next.

Of the several themes contained in the volume, the chief theme is place, or habitat. Citing his work with the White Mountain Apaches, ethnographer Keith Basso distinguishes between site and place—“site being the physical thing itself. You can photograph a site, you can walk on a site. . . .Sites are material. Sites are substantial. In contrast, places are sites that have been invested with meaning. You can’t photograph meaning. You can’t taste it or touch it. It’s immaterial but it is the source from which the significance of places necessarily comes” (31).

Roy Kady describes how the Navajo self-understanding comes from the land. “[T]here’s a reminder in the shape of a hill or a rock . . . where once an important event took place in the creation stories. . . . [T]hey’re important sites because [they] draw out the stories of teaching” (74–75).

Rina Swentzell applies the Pueblo perspective to expand a restrictive definition of community (humans only) to include the “place within which we [live]” (86). “We are breathing the same breath that the rocks do, that the wind does” (87).

Warner Glenn describes the changes in ranching practices over his lifetime, from overloading the land with more cattle than it can handle, to building fences to prevent overgrazing. He belongs to a group that works together with government agencies to help manage the land sustainably.

Former interior secretary Stewart Udall recalls growing up during the Depression. In rural Arizona west of the Divide, the stock market crash did not affect them as much as drought did. The New Deal programs changed the life of the young state by building infrastructure, from civic buildings to forestation projects, to check dams for flood and erosion control. Planning for the future involves taking into consideration the interconnectedness...