Lost Homelands: Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest (review)

In this ambitious study, Audrey Goodman links human bodies and the land via the dynamic tropes of ruin, migration, and reconstruction found in the works of authors, artists, and collaborators, including Charis Wilson and Edward Weston, Cleofas Jaramillo, Frank Waters, Denise Chavez, Georgia O’Keeffe, Terry Tempest Williams, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ellen Meloy, Cormac McCarthy, and Luis Urrea, among others. Specifically, Goodman examines literary and photographic representations of the vernacular southwestern landscape as they oppose idealized “authoritative” aesthetics and as they reveal the trauma induced by the contamination and destruction of bodies, communities, and natural environments. Lost Homelands connects human communities as diverse as New Mexican villagers, atomic scientists at Los Alamos, Japanese citizens interned at Manzanar, Natives living in traditional homelands, downwinders, and transborder migrants. These communities are held together by the desire to belong to a homeland and split apart by forces which threaten community, individual bodies, and the integrity of the land itself. If the work of facilitating intimacy and belonging is often performed by women (as Goodman suggests), the processes of economic disruption, migration, and political conflict—especially the development of the atomic bomb, which altered ecologic systems and human bodies—disrupt sustained intimacy with others and with the land.

Early in her study, Goodman references John Szarkowski’s identification of the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work in representations of the Southwest (10); the same forces pervade Goodman’s study, perhaps by design. She is interested in “how Southwestern landscapes that once represented the dreams of migrants or relatively stable homelands began in the 1930s to articulate the fragmentation and atomization of identity and community” and in how the development of the atomic bomb “has changed our conceptions of the body and our environment and reconfigured the boundaries of human knowledge” (5, 15). Goodman’s diligent efforts in framing each chapter barely keep the many ideas, texts, and images from atomizing. Nevertheless, by the end of the book, her ideas have reached a powerful critical mass.

While Goodman references a wide range of scholarship on the Southwest, her muse is landscape historian J. B. Jackson. Lost Homelands’ chronological journey begins in the Dust Bowl era with an analysis of the image of the road (representative of the displacement of the 1930s). Each subsequent chapter centers on a key symbol which conveys the multiple transformations the region has undergone: the village (icon of the lost, communal past); the bridge (specifically Otowi Bridge, which links disparate cultures as well as domesticity and the destructive potential of the atomic bomb); the desert (locus of spiritual quest and postnuclear protest); and the border (both the geopolitical border and the boundary between life and death, where graves open portals between material and spiritual realms). The final chapter moves beyond all physical boundaries into the realm of magical realism. Ultimately, Goodman hopes that “by making us mindful of the present and encouraging us to excavate the many layers of the past, photographic and literary representations of southwestern landscapes can engage us in the challenging process of living with ruins and constructing homelands in a culture that overtly values mobility, growth, and change” (10).