Tumacacori NHP:Historic Resource Study TUMACACORI Historic Resource Study HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY Tumacacori National Historical Park By Thomas E. Sheridan 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS tuma/hrs/index.htm Last Updated: 12-Mar-2007 http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/tuma/hrs/index.htm[7/12/2013 10:44:06 AM] Tumacacori NHP:Historic Resource Study (Table of Contents) TUMACACORI Historic Resource Study TABLE OF CONTENTS Cover 1. The Production of Space in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley Part I: Landscapes of Community 2. The O'odham World 3. The O'odham and the Jesuits 4. The O'odham and the Franciscans 5. Hispanic Settlement and the Final Displacement of the O'odham Part II: Landscapes of Speculation 6. Early Anglo Speculation and the Tumacacori Land Grant 7. Fictitious Capital and Fictitious Landscapes: Baca Float No. 3 8. The Bottom of the Bottle: From Speculators to Showcase Ranchers on the Santa Cruz 9. Rio Rico and the Great Arizona Land Rush 10. Buried Pasts References Prepared for the National Park Service, Intermountain Region, under cooperative agreement with the Southwestern Missions Research Center, Tucson. <<< Previous <<< Contents>>> Next >>> tuma/hrs/contents.htm Last Updated: 12-Mar-2007 http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/tuma/hrs/contents.htm[7/12/2013 10:44:22 AM] Tumacacori NHP:Historic Resource Study TUMACACORI Historic Resource Study HISTORIC RESOURCE STUDY Tumacacori National Historical Park By Thomas E. Sheridan 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS tuma/hrs/index.htm Last Updated: 12-Mar-2007 http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/tuma/hrs/index.htm[7/12/2013 10:44:24 AM] Tumacacori NHP:Historic Resource Study (Chapter 1) TUMACACORI Historic Resource Study Chapter 1 The Production of Space in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley The book you hold in your hands is a "history" in the sense that it chronicles and interprets social change through time, in this case the creation and destruction of human communities in the Upper Santa Cruz River Valley of southern Arizona from Mission Tumacácori to Rio Rico. Time, after all, has long been the primary analytical axis of our relentlessly teleological Western civilization. Whether we talk about Christian theology, evolutionary psychology, dialectical materialism, or modernization theory, our storylines demand change, evolution, progress through time. We are advancing toward something, a goal, an end, a culmination. The cultural webs we spin are linear, not cyclical. Even critical theorists who challenge deterministic ideologies embrace history. "It is precisely the critical and potentially emancipatory value of the historical imagination, of people 'making history' rather than taking it for granted, that has made it so compulsively appealing," geographer Edward Soja writes. "The development of critical social theory has revolved around the assertion of a mutable history against perspectives and practices that mystify the changeability of the world" (Soja 1989:14). As Soja points out, however, our scholarly obsession with time "submerges and peripheralizes the geographical or spatial imagination" (Soja 1989:15). The spatiality of social life is often overlooked by our linear focus upon sequence and cause and effect. "Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile," Michel Foucault, talking about Western intellectual traditions, noted in an interview. "Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic" (Foucault 1980:70). To restore balance, critical geographers shift attention from time to the other defining axis of human social life: space. "The constitution of society is spatial and temporal, social existence is made concrete in geography and history," Soja (1989:127) notes. Such a statement seems straightforward and intuitively appealing. But when Soja and others talk about the "production of space," a major theme in critical geography since the publication of Henri Lefebvre's seminal work of the same name in 1974, they confound our commonsensical assumptions. Space, after all, is a void to be filled or a gap to be bridged. We can study things in space, but how can space itself be produced? It sounds like a question for physicists, not social scientists. Let us begin to answer that question by taking a drive from Tucson to Nogales, Arizona, through the Upper Santa Cruz Valley, the geographical and intellectual terrain of this study. First of all, we are traveling by car, a manufactured space that surrounds and separates us from the natural environment. Whether we are aware of them or not, our automobile enmeshes us in a complex web of global interrelationships ranging from holes in the ozone layer to wars in the Middle East. No other technological invention since the railroad has transformed space in the American West more profoundly. Automobiles dictate the shape and density of our cities, the quality of our air, the spatial patterns of our neighborhoods, and the http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/tuma/hrs/chap1.htm[7/12/2013 10:44:25 AM] Tumacacori NHP:Historic Resource Study (Chapter 1) location of our workplaces. Originally, the floodplain of the Santa Cruz River bisected the Santa Cruz Valley in a roughly south-to-north direction. The floodplain still exists, even though flow in the river is largely artificial, fed by wastewater from Nogales. But the most important bisection now is Interstate 19, which, speeds us back and forth between Tucson and Ambos Nogales (Nogales Arizona and much larger Nogales, Sonora), [1] usually in air- conditioned isolation with the sounds of norteña, hip-hop, or country-western immersing us in worlds far-removed from the desert landscape receding away from us. Once we reach Nogales, the freeway intersects with another social construction of space, the international border between Mexico and the United States. That border surges with unimaginable energy, the pent-up frustrations and aspirations of Latin America slamming against the barriers of surveillance that try to contain them. The natural unity of the Upper Santa Cruz watershed has been drawn and quartered, first by an imaginary line signifying conquest and national sovereignty, second by an artery of transportation designed to link the two nations together. These two perpendicular constructions, both projections of state power, overwhelm any natural feature of the valley itself. The border and the freeway also express and enable the relentless power of capital to fragment and reconnect, create and destroy. If you were to compare aerial panoramas of the Santa Cruz Valley in 1950 and 2000, the contrasts would astound you. The differences would be particularly dramatic between Sahuarita and Canoa Ranch, a stretch of the valley striking in its spatial schizophrenia. On the west, partially obliterating the Sierrita Mountains, great slagheaps rise like Aztec pyramids. Behind them, hidden from view, huge machines searching for tiny traces of copper spiral deeper into the earth, disgorging the subterranean. The slag heaps did not begin to pile up on the western horizon until the 1950s, a decade when Arizona barreled from its extractive past into its urban future with accelerating speed. Nonetheless, the slag heaps stand as mute testimony to relations of production rooted in an era when extractive industries like copper mining, cattle ranching, and cotton farming dominated the state (Sheridan 1995). To the east, on the other hand, islands of red-tiled roofs creep up the bajada of the Santa Rita Mountains. Green Valley is one of the most successful examples of an entirely new social space—one not even envisioned until the late 1950s. The postwar economic expansion of the United States intersected with the aging of America's population to create a new class of consumers—"active seniors" freed from the constraints of living out their old ages near their children. Responding to this latent demand, retirement communities like Green Valley sprouted fully formed, age-restricted, architecturally uniform. This peculiarly American phenomenon—one symbiotically associated with the country club and golf course cult— flourished in the Arizona sunshine precisely because the invention of air-conditioning kept the desert heat at bay in homes, businesses, and automobiles. The industrial spaces of the modern copper industry and the residential and recreational spaces of Green Valley—not to mention the cool green of Farmer Investment Company's (FICO) pecan groves, the largest pecan farm in the United States—form a startlingly dissonant geographic ensemble that embodies many of the most dynamic trends of capitalist development in Arizona during the past century. When we drive south from Green Valley, however, the natural landscape is less fragmented, the social spaces sloppier and more jumbled. The arts and retirement community of Tubac does not have the same architectural homogeneity of Green Valley, although it clearly aspires to Santa Fe status with a dash of Sonoran style. Just to the south but difficult to see from the freeway, Tumacácori National Historical Park appears as an anachronistic oasis amidst a floodplain cluttered with houses, trailers, and small stores. The small community of Carmen has a messy, lived-in feeling missing from Tubac or Green Valley. No dominant entities or enterprises tie this stretch of the Upper Santa Cruz Valley together. Even the real estate http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/tuma/hrs/chap1.htm[7/12/2013 10:44:25 AM] Tumacacori NHP:Historic Resource Study (Chapter 1) development of Rio Rico, with its network of eroding roads and scattered houses climbing the foothills of the San Cayetano Mountains, conveys little sense of grandiosity or hubris. The swampland swagger of Gulf American and GAC (formerly General Acceptance Corporation), its original developers, dried up and blew away decades ago. Hidden by this hodgepodge are more than three centuries of speculative failure, of grand designs that never amounted to much but left dispossessed people in their wake. One of the major goals of this book is to excavate those failures, to examine the new social spaces they struggled to create and the existing social spaces they destroyed.