Santa Fe

To say that I find the New York Times travel section annoying significantly understates the issue. It's combination of elitism, wealth, and snobbery makes it the least readable section of the paper. It offers virtually nothing to travellers like myself who prefer to go cheap. Even their frugal traveler section really caters to rather expensive tastes.

This all comes out strongly in their constant coverage of New Mexico. The Times loves New Mexico. At least once a month, some article appears about the newest Taos hotel, the charms of Galisteo, or the latest Santa Fe gallery. The paper caters to New Yorkers who want to play out their western fantasies in Santa Fe, all while spending $300 a night on a hotel.

Henry Shukman's cover article in Sunday's section followed in this tradition. This week's New Mexico coverage focused on new developments in Santa Fe. Crazy stuff too. Some new restaurants opened that are slightly different from already existing establishments. The city has the temerity to push a new business district that doesn't per se cater to tourists. Oh, and some galleries are now selling non-Old West art. Wow.

Shukman actually admits one of the most loathsome parts about Santa Fe. Its authenticity is a hoax created in the 1910s to save the city from economic irrelevance. So they created and codified a particular architectural design for the city, forced older buildings to conform, and prohibited new buildings from venturing from the newly constructed norm. They also invented the romantic tricultural heritage myth which says that Indians, Spanish, and Anglos got along peacefully to create tranquil Santa Fe. All of this happened though while whites were stealing the property of the Native American and Hispano population, appropriating and commodifiying those people's authenticity for their own purposes

But while making a nod toward this reality, Shukman also falls into the pseudo-romantic language used by easterners who project their fantasies onto Santa Fe while ignoring the social and cultural realities of the place. See the opening two paragraphs:

"A SUNDAY evening in late June. A crowd of well-dressed people is spilling out of the St. Francis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts in downtown Santa Fe, a grand adobe building some 90 years old, with monolithic mud towers and tender curvaceous walls connecting them. The late sun doesn't just gleam on the old adobe edifice. It's deeper than that. The red and orange that lights up on the walls, over the heads of the exiting crowd, seems to come from deep within them. The low light transforms the scene into a vision.

There's a moment like this almost every evening in Santa Fe, when the light suddenly transfigures the earthen buildings, the lush cottonwood trees, even the blacktop and cars. It all becomes luminous and dreamlike. It's as if the light contains some special MSG of sight, and one can't stop staring. Santa Fe must have offered this spectacle for the last four centuries, since the Palace of the Governors was built on the plaza by the Spanish."

Jesus Christ. I think that special MSG of sight is a LSD flashback that hits everytime visitors come to Santa Fe. They certainly don't feel this way about Española, Pecos, or Truchas. These places scare them. They might be quaint and worth a quick visit, but they don't have the nice white safety of Santa Fe.

Santa Fe exists on the backs of poor brown people. The white elites of the city have created a historical fantasy that brings in millions of dollars a year. That would be OK if they didn't falsify what they were doing behind a facade of authenticity. Today, Santa Fe is one of the whitest towns in New Mexico's heartland. You see brown people, but they are mostly working class folks who cannot afford to live in this insanely expensive city. So they are forced to live on the pueblos and in the towns and villages outside Santa Fe and commute to work, thus spending a large percentage of their meagre wages on gasoline and car bills. Meanwhile, the cheapest place the Times recommends to stay in this story costs a mere $85 a night and it condescends in its description of the place.

But hey, those romantic brown people sure do provide a lovely flavor of authenticity to my Santa Fe fantasies. It's great to be white. You can project your desires on brown people around the world, throw some money around, and believe them to be true. You get to be served by brown people who make you feel white, er, special! You don't have to worry about the actual conditions people live in. And when you leave, you can take stories about those quaint natives who have such funny customs and ways of speaking!!!