Albuquerque native Kyle Paoletta now lives in Massachusetts and has heard a lot of misconceptions about the Southwest. It spurred him to write his book “American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest,” which explores five cities – Albuquerque, El Paso, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson – and why the lessons learned in this region are relevant for the rest of the country in the era of mass migration and climate change. He’s speaking in Albuquerque on Thursday and Santa Fe on Friday.
KYLE PAOLETTA: You’ll often hear this kind of refrain of like, oh, how could people live there? Like, how could people live in the desert? And I have to explain to people, I mean, if you’re talking about Albuquerque, the Pueblos were there for hundreds and hundreds of years before the Spanish came. The idea that it’s inexplicable that people would live in the desert is just so baffling to me. So I mean, I think what I first got interested in with the book was explaining the southwest to the rest of the country, but in the process, it also became a project of explaining the southwest to itself.
KUNM: You have a great passage about a census taker who is trying to parse the answer of a man in Albuquerque who said he was not Hispanic, but Indo-Hispano, mostly Jewish. Identity in New Mexico is very complex. Do you see larger lessons here for the United States?
PAOLETTA: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think we have often told ourselves a story as Americans of you know, the melting pot, or the kind of like people come from all over the world are welcomed here and integrated into the country. I mean, you just have to look at our current politics to know that that’s not really how it works, and that’s not how it’s ever worked. I mean, my own family were Sicilian and Italian immigrants who lived in, you know, terrible conditions in Boston when they first immigrated. My grandmother’s family were Eastern European Jews, similarly, living in Chicago and New York before they moved to New Mexico as part of that wave of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century who went West, kind of trying to escape the intolerance of the America that they had first found themselves in…