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“Maybe it’s being a familiar kind of stranger that’s made me so painfully aware lately of what other strangers do when they come to visit, the ways they’re embarrassing themselves and curiously dishonoring the place they claim to find so magical, so peaceful, such a respite from what they persistently term the outside world. At the same time that Santa Fe and Taos undergo a massive and perhaps irreversible gentrification process, there’s also an enormous, long-awaited upheaval going on, a wave all those strangers are missing even as it rises under their feet and threatens to sweep them away.
That wave led to a newly energized Native-led activist movement, which is pointing out some of the region’s most persistent injustices. There’s also a renewed tension around some very old sore spots concerning colonialism, genocide, appropriation, and the complexities of shared boundaries and property lines, both real and metaphysical. That surge in activism and tense debate is at jarring, sometimes offensive odds with the way I see non-Native people in hip coastal cities talking about Santa Fe: as a placid little hippie town where they go to unwind.
Some of the outsiders’ increased interest is linked to ’70s revivalism in fashion—an earth goddess hippie chic Laurel Canyon look meets denim jumpsuit meets Hell’s Angels fashion mishmash, three forking roads that convene into a singular desire to ride down a wide, deserted, sunbaked highway in a yellow El Camino. (Coach’s Fall 2018 show managed to throw all these elements together in a way that makes it clear we’re surely nearing desert-fashion saturation.) And some of it is due to the apparently unkillable popularity of the Coachella Valley Arts & Music Festival, which led, initially, to the mainstreaming of the desert-festival aesthetic and is now a much broader yet clearly identifiable set of lifestyle aspirations.”
– Jezebel, Manifest Destiny-Lite With Souvenirs: Why Assholes in Turquoise Are Flooding the Southwest.
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #14 – Manifested Identity (Santa Fe).
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
