The Southwest region includes New Mexico, Arizona, southern Utah, southern Nevada, and the adjoining parts of Colorado, Texas and California, mingling Native Americans, Hispanics and waves of European American immigration. Although the Southwest, more than many other US regions, connotes a coherent regional style in architecture, food and other aesthetics, the meanings of the Southwest have varied over time. From an early association with the “primitive” West of “wild Indians,” to the tranquil vacation destination of the 1950s, to its current association with the border and retirement communities, the Southwest remains a touchstone for what is essentially American.

The romance of the early Southwest attracted nineteenth-century collectors of antiquities and pot-hunters alike, whose influence remains clear today in the development of Native American crafts industries. The status of Native Americans as subjects of a colonizing state was clear in the early ethnological and archaeological explorations among the pueblo dwellers funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the concessions given to mining companies such as Peabody Coal, despite the fact that the reservations of the Navajos, Hopis and Zunis are sovereign territories. Early visitors also established discourses of the region, talking about both Native Americans and the colors and forms of deserts and mountains.

In the postwar years, the desert Southwest grew as a destination for American families on vacation, lured by the Grand Canyon and the last reminders of the frontier, evident in abandoned mines, ghost towns and places like Tombstone, Arizona. Roadside attractions like the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo (Texas) and trading posts, natural phenomena like the Petrified Forest and historical sites such as Los Alamos (New Mexico), Santa Fe, the alleged UFO landing site at Rosewell (New Mexico), Native American reservations and missions from San Antonio (Texas) to the California coast all pulled in tourists. Like the road movie, the family driving vacation along western highways, including Route 66, has produced enduring images of the neon-lit motor courts and the station wagon as symbols of American freedom, family values and leisure.

The monumental landscape of the Southwest also figured significantly in the romantic imagination of North Americans in literature and film. The red rocks of Monument Valley evident in John Ford westerns such as The Seekers (1956) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), suggested not only the desolation and wildness that was the American West, but the epic proportion of human struggles there. This evocation of the West as a lonely place in which to hide, where freedom and danger were mixed, remains a theme in more recent films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kïd (1969) and Thelma and Louise (1991); the quest also underpinned television’s 1960s series Route 66. The landscapes and intersecting peoples of the desert Southwest also have inspired popular authors such as Barbara Kingsolver, Tony Hillerman and Leslie Marmon Silko.

As the industrial Northeast declined, the Southwest grew into the Sunbelt, attracting an influx of rich white North Americans to planned retirement communities like Sun City and poor South and Central Americans to its transient-based service economy Early predictions of a massive movement of people from the Rustbelt to the burgeoning Southwest have not been entirely borne out, although Phoenix, the largest city in the region, proved popular as a vacation and conference site. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, the Southwest also became a mecca for those seeking an alternative lifestyle.

Inspired by writers such as Carlos Castañeda, young whites moved to Tucson and northern New Mexico. The New Age movement is the heir to this earlier migration; mystical places like Sedona, Arizona continue to draw those interested in harmonic convergences and holistic healing.

The contemporary Southwest is also organized by the border, which produced a mixed population including white retirees, ranchers, entrepreneurs, transient white laborers, Mexican cross-border workers, Native Americans, a Chicano underclass and a Mexican American middle class, among others. Pockets of Hispanics, descendants of the original Spanish land grantees, can also be found. African Americans remain under-represented.

This hybridity is clear in the development of the distinctive Southwestern architecture, cuisine and culture: Southwest style.

The architecture of the Southwest, for example, spans Navajo hogans and Hopi pueblos, retirement cities and condo complexes. The architectural style that characterizes the region, often referred to as Santa Fe style, is based on traditional single-story adobe houses with saguaro cactus rib-ceilings. Modern home construction now produces pink, orange and pastel versions of these houses all over the Southwest. The frequent inclusion of ornamental ladders reminiscent of those found in pueblos indicates increasing commodification, while the saguaro cactus is now an iconic design element. Art and architecture have become kitsch in the Southwest, where Navajo turquoise jewelry vies with painted wooden coyotes wearing kerchiefs and howling at the moon. The artistic richness of Georgia O’Keefe is now overlaid with the prolific paintings of Amado Peña, known for his prints of Native American and Latina women depicted with pottery and/or children. Native American crafts have also been subjected to the mass marketing and production which have degraded local artisanal values while simultaneously producing a Southwestern “look” across the US.

Food in the Southwest shows the influence of cross-border traffic and a longstanding hybrid cuisine of Native American and Latino traditions. Tex-Mex refers to the spicy blending of border foods that has led to chili with beans and meat, the use of guacamole and sour cream and the success of Taco Bell as a franchise. Navajo tacos, made with Navajo fry bread rather than tortillas, also show the creative mixing of ingredients and cooking styles found in the Southwest. What is generically referred to as “Mexican food” includes many variations, from Tex-Mex to the Sonoroan home-style cooking with its carne asada and salsa verde. The national ubiquity of salsa attests to the widespread appeal of the hybrid cooking coming out of the Southwest.

The turbulence produced by the border is clear not only in aesthetic hybridity but in regional politics. The Southwest often has been characterized by the conservative, libertarian politics of white politicians like Barry Goldwater, who exemplified the western individualist’s rejection of federal government intervention. Yet, issues of ethnicity historical memory bilingualism and illegal immigration (captured in John Sayles’ Lone Star, 1995) have worked to consolidate a more liberal, Latino political consciousness. A radical political tradition associated with the Tucson-based Earth First! was inspired by the radical environmentalism of Edward Abbey in his Desert Solitaire (1968). Environmental politics also focus on water—the Southwest has been particularly shaped by disputes over saline water in the Colorado River system, treaty obligations to Mexico and largescale water projects like the Hoover Dam and Lake Powell. The relevance of these border politics to the rest of the country is clear in the controversy surrounding NAFTA.