(Re)appropriating The Petroglyphs: Commercial representations of a cultural landscape

Abstract

This article examines the case of the Albuquerque Petroglyphs to explore how government and business commercially appropriate and reappropriate cultural landscapes for use in capitalistic development. The Petroglyph National Monument was established in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to protect an area and rock carvings from looting and development. Stakeholders evoked Pueblo and Spanish sacredness in their protection arguments to establish the monument. When governmental officials then controversially moved protected rock carvings to build a commuter road through the monument to access development, the rights of developers and consumers were privileged over Pueblo and environmental groups. Developers then drew from governmental framings and evoked a heightened Spanish colonial and commercial heritage to market nearby homes to consumers. This article argues that protection discourses can contribute to, rather than restrict, subsequent commercial development.

Keywords

commercial appropriation consumerism development environment landscape petroglyphs

Public parks in the USA are generally perceived as an ideal way to protect landscapes and environmentally significant sites from ill-intending landowners, developers and consumers. Yet, while park promoters may have noble intentions, protectionism can come at a price. In the campaign to create the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, for example, Weaver (1996) uses the term ‘benevolent capitalism’ to show how parties sold the campaign by promoting commercial ventures and by encouraging negative cultural stereotypes of mountaineers to expel them from the land. While park promoters and governmental agencies typically are depicted as protectors, Weaver illustrates the commercial appropriations of nature and the more complicated implications of preservationism.

Human perceptions of environmentally significant sites and cultural landscapes are influenced by a combination of governmental framings and commercial practices, where people often understand nature and landscape through a consumer lens. By promoting a particular essence, government can influence how people understand and treat places. Businesses can then reappropriate governmental messages to market to consumers, illustrating the ubiquitous yet obscure flow between government and business (Zagacki and Gallagher, 2009).

The commercialization and (re)appropriation of a cultural landscape can be seen on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where stakeholders have promoted and marketed varying versions of ‘The Petroglyphs’. The area and petroglyphs – images etched onto rocks – hold special meaning to local Pueblo people who continue to regard highly the area and use it for spiritual purposes. In 1990, virtually everyone supported governmental protection of the rocks and landscape, and the area was turned into The Petroglyph National Monument, a unit of the US National Park Service (NPS). Park promoters argued that the monument would forever protect the land and rocks. However, after a 10-year battle, city and state government controversially moved protected rocks within the park to build a freeway-like extension road through the monument to access sprawling development. Additionally, developers are reappropriating the landscape by erecting housing communities that evoke the monument, such as ‘The Petroglyphs Master Planned Community’.

Here, I offer this compelling case study to show how government and business define and (re)appropriate landscapes for use in capitalistic development. Reappropriating the land and rocks occurs in a layered process. Native Americans originally made the rock carvings and consider the area special, and Spanish colonizers and present-day individuals have modified and added carvings. Park promoters then offered a particular sacred version of these representations to argue the need for a national monument to protect, own and use the site. Through a process of double appropriation developers then began marketing housing properties by reappropriating Spanish colonial heritage, where government-based discourses can promote and add legitimacy to, rather than restrict, subsequent commercial development.

In essence, under the guise of protectionism, by creating a particular version of an area, government and developers can encourage commercial framings of cultural landscapes. To argue this point, I first examine the concept of nature as a social construct and the commercial appropriation of landscape. Next, I offer a context and history of the area, including the role of government and business in making the monument and housing developments. I then analyze public and commercial texts to illustrate how government and developers create and reappropriate representations of the rocks and landscape around consumerism. I end with possible repercussions of these practices, and I identify how this article contributes to current debates about the intersection between public and private commercialization.

Commercial (re)appropriations of nature and cultural landscapes

Many people perceive nature and landscape though a consumer lens, where government, cultural systems, businesses and economic practices can encourage commercial appropriations. In this section I begin with a discussion of nature as a social construct – the idea of a ‘social nature’ – as well as the notion of cultural landscape, where people culturally frame, perceive, and use nature and space. The process of reappropriation begins within cultural and economic contexts of consumerism, and government then establishes and reinforces commercial iterations. Moreover, under the pretense of protectionism, profit-oriented commercial agents can reappropriate governmental framings to sell products and services. Combined, these practices comprise a process of double appropriation and simulation, where government and businesses rely on each other to create, copy and reappropriate.

Social nature and cultural landscapes

This article is relevant to the study of nature as a social construct, or the notion of a ‘social nature’ (e.g. see Castree and Braun, 1998; Demeritt, 2002; Williams, 1980). Across disciplines, scholars examine how humans use cultural systems to determine what the physical world is and what it means. Humans do not just experience physical stimuli; via systems of signs, they symbolically construct and cognitively and emotionally perceive and act based on those perceptions. In this process, as Cavallaro notes, ‘Signs do not embody specific meaning or concepts. Rather, they give us clues which only lead to meanings through interpretation’ (2006: 16). What a rock denotes to different people, then, depends on how the rock, as a sign, is appropriated with meaning and interpreted. Essentially, on one hand, there is likely a ‘real’ world, made up of physical and material phenomena and entities that likely exist independent of human thought and culture. Yet, what nature and landscape come to mean is contingent on culture.

Landscape is a socially formed and symbolic way of seeing and representing the world (Cosgrove, 1998, 2008). Similar to the notion of nature as a social construct, Cosgrove (1998: 13) notes how ‘landscape denotes the external world mediated through subjective human experience in a way that neither region nor area immediately suggest’. Corner (1999) argues that landscapes are not merely a passive product of culture but an agent that constructs and enriches culture. Moreover, landscape, culture and human-made structures are interrelated, where ideas of landscape ‘inform the physical practices of design and building, and these, in turn, further transform and enrich cultural ideas’ (Corner, 1999: 7).

Landscape and reiterations of space also point to the intersection between wilderness and national formation and identity in the Americas (Cosgrove, 2008). Illustrating the intersection between commercialization and landscape in North America, early colonial representations of landscape were incorporated into European systems of commercial capitalism (Cosgrove, 1998). In this way, the production and consumption of ‘environmental’ and ‘wilderness’ sites and landscapes are intertwined with capitalist economics and politics (Baker, 2002).

Economic and cultural contexts of consumerism

Conceptualizations of nature and landscape can be situated deeply within social and economic contexts of consumption and consumerism. In capitalistic and hyper-consumer cultures in particular, commercialization relies on the presence of objects and ideas that humans can appropriate, possess, exchange and consume, including land, rocks and even an area’s ‘sacredness’. Like virtually anything in hyper-consumer cultures, landscapes and environmental entities can be morphed into a commodity; the more landscapes and objects are molded to ensure uniqueness among other goods, the better they can be sold (Marx, 1986; Rogers, 2006). Within this process, signs that are linked to commodities are embedded with values (Opel, 2003).

Thus, cultural practices and consumerism are linked, where consumption can be conceptualized as the epicenter of culture (Baudrillard, 1998). Economic and cultural systems promote the ‘cultural consumption’ of nature and landscape, whereby places and objects are constructed and consumed to form and reinforce cultural identities (Lutz and Collins, 1993; Pratt, 1992).¹ Landscape becomes a place where individual, local, and national identities are imagined, constructed, and performed.

The role of government and business in commercial (re)appropriation and simulation

Within the context of consumerism, government can shape meaning significantly by representing nature and landscape in particular ways. In the USA, discourses found in public hearings, publications and public places are influential in shaping environmental meaning systems and conceptualizations of space (Sack, 1986). Governmental framings of a variety of places influence understandings and experiences, such as in public parks (Oravec, 1981), monuments and memorials (Foss, 1986; Gallagher, 1995), and museums (Dickinson et al., 2006). In this process, government officials are particularly powerful in their ability to appropriate and mold environmental messages (Wolfe, 2007), and governmental agencies such as the NPS also play an important role. Additionally, government can promote commercial appropriations within public sites. In many national parks, for example, tourism, archeological research, natural resource extraction, art and park management are important commercial industries.

In addition to government, businesses influence how people perceive landscape and nature, where they can use commercialized versions to sell products and services. Businesses frame environmental messages through practices such as green advertising and merchandising and corporate greening (Benton, 1995; Opel, 1999; Price, 1996). Commercialized messages can appear in wildlife and animal tourism (Milstein, 2008) and for-profit theme parks can use depictions of nature to promote commercial endeavors (Davis, 1996; Zukin, 1991). Price (1996) examines how The Nature Company and shopping malls encourage people to think about nature by consuming it in order to preserve it. Not surprisingly, under the pretense of environmentalism, businesses can sell their products and services as ‘green’, and these framings influence how people perceive environmental issues.

Moreover, a bleeding between public and private interests allows businesses and governmental framings to draw from one another to encourage people to think about nature and landscape in commercialized ways. Opel (2003: 36) names this blending the ‘erosion of the boundaries between the public and private’, and Davis (1996: 506) argues that this ‘commercial confusion of retail space with public space’ is becoming increasingly popular in commercial venues. For example, Davis suggests that corporate sites such as Sea World use rhetorics of public education and environmental protection to style themselves as public facilities, a process that obscures how they are a for-profit business. Although the Busch Entertainment Company runs Sea World as a highly commercial site, it uses environmental education and conservation programs to depict itself as a public service.

Last, the ways in which government and business re-appropriate the appropriated can occur within a simulated process. Here, parties can iterate (and reiterate) and make copies (and copies of copies) of things and landscapes to sell them.² As a result, the difference between an object and its representation can be obscured, where parties can reach back to re-establish representations and re-create meaning systems. Reappropriation and simulation are useful to consider here as they help to understand how messages and images become (re)representations, how this process is facilitated by cultural systems that continually replicate ideas and concepts, and the possible effects.

The case of the Albuquerque Petroglyphs: The rocks, the monument, and development

As I illustrated above, there is a powerful relationship between landscape, government, business, and commercial and economic practices. I attempt to theorize further this interconnectedness using the case study of the Albuquerque Petroglyphs. I analyzed a number of documents to investigate this case. First, for insight into the creation and management of the national monument, I examined public governmental documents. In a hearing before Congress, parties discuss the importance of preserving the area. In the Petroglyph National Monument Establishment Act of 1989 (US Senate, 1989; hereafter ‘Establishment Act’) politicians, Pueblo people, developers and residents argue in support of the monument, viewpoints that were turned into Public Law 101–313 (1990). The General Management Plan (1996) details possibilities to create and manage the monument. The Petroglyph National Monument Boundary Adjustment Act of 1997 (US Senate, 1997; hereafter ‘Adjustment Act’) summarizes the dispute over building the highway through the monument, and the NPS’s website shows the monument’s continued management. Next, to investigate commercial representations, I analyzed web pages from three development companies – Westland Development Company, SunCal Companies and SunCal New Mexico Development Company. Last, I researched news reports on the monument, developments and the debate over the road.

The rock carvings and the area in which they lie have a number of unique features. The area rests on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where, for centuries, people have carved images onto the rocks. Geologists and geographers say the basalt lava rocks rest on an old volcano escarpment saddled against five dormant volcanoes on the west side of the Rio Grande River. Archeologists date most of the carvings between the years 1300 and 1680, although some are said to be as much as 2000 to 3000 years old, and a few as old as 2000 bc. Spanish colonizers, settlers, and present-day individuals have added and modified rock carvings.

Many Pueblo people consider the site important and use it for traditional and ritual purposes, and Pueblo interpretations often differ from archeological and geographical accounts. William Weahkee of the Pueblo of Sandia notes that the area’s significance stems from the ‘five extinct volcanoes that are sitting right straight in a row … we have a third world that we communicate with through the vents in the petroglyphs’ (US Senate, 1997: 47). Many Pueblo people have resisted divulging details such as these to Euro-Americans (Brody, 2004); stemming from years of having their appropriations abused, Pueblo people have largely stopped talking about the site and rocks. Weahkee notes, ‘I cannot tell you anything because a long time ago, back in the 1500’s, the Spaniards came here and they tortured my people … [forcing] our religion to go underground’ (US Senate, 1997: 47).

Non-Pueblo people, therefore, increasingly have limited information of Native meaning systems, yet modern claims of dating, origin and significance that stem from Cultural Resource Management practices and scientific and archeological systems are often legitimized. As Rogers (2007: 55) contends: ‘Unconscious assumptions about archaeological significance and value do not only have the potential to distort understandings of cultural resources; such assumptions, embedded in taken-for-granted ideologies, determine what will be labeled and treated as a valuable resource.’ Corbin (2009) adds that part of the difficulty for Native Americans ‘is in convincing the public and lawmakers that they cannot just point to specific pieces of rock art that are sacred: the entire area is a coherent whole and needs to be understood and respected on its own terms’. In effect, scientific and archeological discourses typically are granted authority even though they go against the narratives of indigenous cultures.

In the late 1980s the land and rocks were threatened by looting, development and pollution; some people were even shooting at rock carvings for target practice. With support from developers, Native Americans, environmentalists and area residents, Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman proposed legislation to create a national monument to protect the rocks and land. In 1990, federal government turned a 7000-acre area containing rock carvings into the Petroglyph National Monument, a protected site containing approximately 25,000 rock carvings. The national park is co-owned and managed by the city of Albuquerque and the NPS and averages between 300,000 and 400,000 visitors a year.

In 2007, after a bitter 10-year conflict involving politicians, developers, environmentalists and activists, the city built a commuter road through the monument to enable easier access to nearby developments. In constructing the road, the city moved several significant rocks in the protected zone to another part of the monument. The conflict began in the early 1990s when a developer, local politicians and some area residents wanted the road to improve access to nearby developments. Developers, area residents, several city council members, Senator Pete Domenici and eventually Governor Bill Richardson argued the road was needed for progress and was intended in the original monument plan, a fact the NPS disputed. Those who fought against the road included the NPS, Native American groups, the Sierra Club, area residents and activists. Taking the fight to a national level and demonstrating national party politics, Senator Domenici proposed federal legislation requesting a strip of land within the park to be returned to the ownership of the city and state to build the road, and the bill was passed. After several lawsuits and campaigns, voters passed a road bond measure to fund and build the road.

Constructing the road and moving the rocks angered and saddened a number of people. In the Adjustment Act, Weahkee argues that a vote for the road ‘is a vote for religious bigotry and a prelude to the annihilation of an indigenous religion’ (US Senate, 1997: 46–7). Whereas virtually all groups once supported the monument, now some came to rue local and state governments’ decisions to build the road and move the rocks and federal government for not fully intervening. Road opponents considered the road to be in direct violation of cultural and environmental protectionism, and they argued that politicians, developers and residents egregiously disregarded Pueblo peoples’ and environmentalists’ wishes.

As a continuation of appropriations of the area, developers are constructing housing communities near the monument that tap into the monument’s framing. The role of developers and their link to consumerism in this case has a complex history, and an overview is important. After attempts to colonize parts of what is now New Mexico, in 1692 Spain created the Atrisco Land Grant, 65,000 acres of land near the Rio Grande River. The land was awarded for economic settlement and to explorers who quelled local Pueblo resistance. In the 1960s, the New Mexico legislature allowed many of the 7000 land grant heirs to form the Westland Development Company, a private corporation. Westland Development owned approximately 57,000 acres of land and supported the making of the national monument. Westland began building developments near the monument, including a 6400-acre housing community called ‘The Petroglyphs Master Planned Community’, or simply ‘The Petroglyphs’. In 2006 the development was sold to SunCal, a private California real estate and development company and was managed by its subsidiary SunCal New Mexico which called the venture a ‘legacy development’ (O’Connell, 2008). The area was then sold to Western Albuquerque Land Holdings after SunCal went bankrupt (Childress, 2010).

The area continues to be used and interpreted by people in a variety of ways. Monument visitors characteristically view the site through the lens of tourism, where paying money to enter the park can turn the rocks and area into a site of consumption. Some locals see the rocks as important artifacts that should be preserved at all cost; others argue that economic development is most important and justified building the road and moving the rocks.

Although various people interpret and appropriate the area in specific ways, the landscape and rocks become contested when perspectives differ. In the process of disagreement, dominant groups typically have the power to decide which version is most important. In the next section, I illustrate how government appropriates a version of the area to advocate for its protection. Yet, what is sold is the notion of a special Spanish cultural place, ultimately to the detriment of local Pueblo meaning systems. This reiteration helps set the stage for businesses that later reappropriate governmental representations.

The national monument: Appropriating the sacred to protect, own and use

In governmental documents, parties use a four-part argument to advocate for the creation of the monument. Parties promote the site as a special space that they substantiate by rearticulating Native American belief systems and Spanish heritage. Advocates then argue that because the area is special it needs federal protection and ownership. Governmental ownership then necessitates providing ways for the public to use the monument. I outline these four rationales below – sacredness, protection, ownership and utility – to show how they form the argument that stakeholders use to justify protection. Later, I will illustrate how these arguments help contribute to building the road, moving the rocks and promoting private land ownership.

Establishing ‘the sacred’

First, stakeholders argue the area and rocks have a special and ‘sacred’ essence. Senator Domenici describes the area’s special qualities: ‘Jutting up from the mesa top are five steep volcanic cones that now stand in silent testimony to the violent [volcano] eruptions … the dark ribbon of the escarpment and its volcanic cones deepen to a primordial black’ (US Senate, 1989: 31). Park promoters position this uniqueness as ‘nationally significant’ and important to local and national identity. In the Establishment Act (US Senate, 1989: 54), Mayor Ken Shultz notes: ‘We have the responsibility, if not the moral obligation, to guarantee that 12,000 years of human history and thousands of artistic creations etched into the black rock … do not perish.’

Advocates turn to and reappropriate Pueblo belief systems to validate the area’s sacredness. In the Establishment Act (US Senate, 1989: 26) parties position the area as ‘a part of an ancient religion which lives on in the culture at the Pueblo of Zuni’. Government continues to evoke Pueblo sacredness, as seen on the NPS website: ‘Petroglyphs are central to the monument’s sacred landscape where traditional ceremonies still take place’ (National Park Service, 2006d), and ‘Pueblo Indians use petroglyphs to teach their children about their history, culture, and spiritual beliefs’ (National Park Service, 2006c). Monument promoters also point to Pueblo people who themselves advocate for protecting the area and Indigenous rights. Herman Agoyo, chairperson of the All Indian Pueblo Council, argues that the monument will ‘help insure for the Pueblo Indians their First Amendment rights under the United States Constitution’ (US Senate, 1989: 118). Pueblo sacredness becomes an important part of the protection argument.

Stakeholders also turn to Spanish heritage as a reason to protect. In many examples both Native and Spanish groups are positioned as significant, such as when the rocks are called ‘historic Indian and Spanish petroglyphs’ (US Senate, 1989: 15, emphasis added). Initially, while it appears both cultures are important, a Spanish colonial heritage is favored. One historical account provides an example:

Coronado led the first European expedition to contact Pueblo villages in the Southwest, and spent the winters of 1540–1542 along the west bank of the Rio Grande. Soon, conflicts with the newcomers began to frighten the local native peoples away … Hispanic settlement of the Rio Grande valley increased, and former Indian lands were divided into land grants. In 1680 Pueblo Indians united in a revolt that drove out Spanish colonists. The Spanish returned to New Mexico in 1692 and soon thereafter, the Atrisco Land Grant was established. (National Park Service, 2006a)

This passage discusses both Pueblo and Spanish people. However, Spanish colonizers who ‘spent the winters’ are presented as visiting in a manner that resembles vacationing (versus killing and pillaging). The passage positions a passive and nonspecific ‘conflict’ as the problem that burdens the ‘newcomers’. Local Native people are depicted as timid and ‘frightened’ by the conflict in a manner that reeks of a character flaw, and they flee and then rebel. The Spanish then ‘returned’ to their land, as legitimized by the Atrisco Land Grant. These Spanish colonial-centric history narratives take the center stage in written accounts of the area.

The question here becomes, why promote the significance of Spanish colonial perspectives over Pueblo importance? One possibility is that what needs protecting is an important Spanish colonial legacy that is tied to the land, that supports modern consumerism and that will eventually support private land ownership. Important to remember is that European colonial expansion was a decidedly commercialized and territorial enterprise (Sack, 1986). Spain stood to gain enormous fortunes in the Americas through land acquisition and natural and mineral resource extraction. What emerges as valuable, then, are not the rocks and area in their own right, but historical accounts that remind of a commercial colonial history, one that is directly tied to a consumer present. In this case, narratives proffer a unique Pueblo specialness yet end up privileging a commercial Spanish colonial past.

Appropriating the sacred to protect, own and use

Once the area is deemed special, the argument naturally follows that the land and rocks need protecting. Stakeholders point to encroaching development, gunfire, attempts to remove the rocks, heavy equipment and construction. In a statement in support of creating the monument (that would later be ironic), Herman Agoyo reminds of ‘the last horrifying defacement of the petroglyphs’ in 1972 when Interstate 25 was constructed and thousands of rock carvings were destroyed (Preservation of Petroglyphs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1988: 9). The area then is reappropriated within the safekeeping of environmental and archeological protection acts.

Parties then advocate federal and state governmental ownership as the ideal way to protect. In the Establishment Act (US Senate, 1989: 4) parties hierarchically position owners and their roles:

(3) the State has shown great leadership by recognizing the importance of the archeological resources … (4) the city of Albuquerque has played a significant role in the preservation … (5) the Middle Rio Grande Pueblo Tribes have shown a strong and sincere interest in preservation of their heritage through protection … (6) the Atrisco Land Grant, now held by Westland … in the preservation of their traditional lands.

Here, all parties are acknowledged – state and city government, Pueblo people and developers. Yet, specific roles and relationships between the owners are ascribed. Here, the state is positioned as the ‘leader’, the city as the overseer, Pueblo people as protectors of their ‘heritage’ and developers as preservers of their ‘traditional lands’. The documents acknowledge Pueblo heritage, but heritage cannot be owned while (Spanish) land can. It appears the texts include Pueblo people, yet parties legitimize colonial land grants, and therefore the rights of contemporary development companies, when they establish Spanish land grant heirs as the rightful owners. How ownership is discussed early on later influences how the rights of Spanish land grant heirs, developers and consumers will be privileged over Pueblo groups.

Once the area is governmentally owned, it must serve a public purpose; with governmental ownership often comes an economic and political commitment for public use. People in North American cities often feel entitled to public service benefits they believe are owed to them (Sack, 1986). As governmental officials transform the area into a public acquisition, they must show that it (and the financial resources used to procure it) serves a utilitarian purpose. The notion that public parks are for people to experience is central to public park ideology.

As the area becomes transformed for public use, commercial appropriations are more visible. The site is converted into an economic, research, tourist, educational and artistic resource that is needed for ‘ethnographic studies, resource management techniques, and comparative studies of rock art forms and style’ (Public Law 101–313, 1990: 276). The General Management Plan (1996: 2, 7) notes that tourism will contribute to the economy, and the monument can ‘be appreciated by non-Indians as a rich visual gallery of prehistoric artistry’, and, ‘provide opportunities to experience contrasts with a growing urban environment’. The Albuquerque Petroglyphs can serve as ‘a focal point for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information relating to Rio Grande style and other forms of petroglyphs and pictographs’ (1996: 7). Visitors are then guided to use the area in particular ways. The NPS even has specific (and rather ironic) instructions for visitor use: ‘Do not re-arrange the rocks or move things from where you find them’ (National Park Service, 2006b). Here, the area is promoted as a space for public use.

Essentially, as I have illustrated above, through a process of reappropriation and simulation, park promoters reach back to Native American and Spanish belief systems to argue the need to protect. Yet the arguments used in the creation of the monument are unstable human teleological arguments. The instability of the protection rhetorics becomes apparent when the argument changes to suit political needs. For example, in the Adjustment Act (US Senate 1997: 21), in a debate over the road, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell argues the road should be built because:

No matter what you do, no matter how you protect them, they are going to go. They are deteriorating from rain, from sand, from wind, from what is sometimes called varnish that builds up over centuries on it … it is only a matter of time, another hundred or thousand years … before they all disappear anyway.

Whereas once stakeholders advocated protecting the rocks and area, in the face of development, the rocks are deemed unnecessary. Parties initially claimed to protect both Native American and Spanish sacredness, but when the city moved petroglyphs to build the highway, they forsook Pueblo interpretations for the rights of developers, consumers and Spanish land grant heirs.

(Re)appropriating ‘The Petroglyphs’: Housing developments

Developers reappropriate the area in a distinct way to market housing communities, and they tap into governmental framings to do so. Interestingly, the sacredness that parties linked to Pueblo belief systems in governmental documents is notably missing; what remains is a heightened Spanish colonial legacy. Developers rework their own notions of protection, ownership and utility to promote a distinctly individual commercialized place. In effect, in commercial reappropriations, developers offer a sacredness that can be consumed as private property.

Rearticulating a Spanish colonial legacy

In commercial texts, the importance associated with Pueblo cultures is absent. Instead, developers rely on a Spanish legacy to establish the area’s importance by presenting a heightened colonial history through the tradition of Spanish expansion. One version from a development company website follows:

In 1680, an Indian leader by the name of Pope organized the Pueblo Indians to revolt against the Spanish settlers. The uprising, known as the Pueblo Revolt, drove the settlers out of the Rio Grande Valley. In 1692 … Don Diego DeVargas y Lujan led a group of volunteers to re-enter the land the Spanish had been driven out of 12 years earlier. [He] was among those volunteers and was granted two tracts of land as repayment for his service. (Westland Development Company, 2003b)

Here, the area is positioned first through Spanish settlement, which is threatened by Pueblo people. Spanish ‘volunteers’ are ‘driven out’ by a ‘revolt’, and they rightfully reclaim and ‘return’ to their space. The Spanish ‘volunteers’ then are rewarded with saving the area from Pueblo people and become rightful land owners.

Further reiterating the importance of a colonial history, SunCal New Mexico Development Company (2007c) positions its new developments in ‘the core planning philosophy of The Laws of the Indies’, a highly controlled governing set of laws decreed by the Spanish Crown beginning in the 16th century that dictated how colonists should settle the Americas. SunCal New Mexico (2007c) maintains that this law ensures that ‘socializing is enabled and encouraged through the strategic placement of parks, plazas, monumental civic buildings and commercial centers’. Here, in addition to a colonial heritage, old colonial social planning techniques and economic systems are important.

Using colonial narratives and reaching back to (re)appropriate can be problematic. Messages that center on remembering and forgetting influence perceptions and relationships with landscape and space (Denzin, 2004; Dickinson et al., 2006; Gallagher, 1995). The development texts I analyzed argue that the way to move forward to fit capitalistic notions of development and progress is to go back to specific colonial (and highly commercial) management strategies. These arguments expose a central quandary. If government did not offer protection, the area would likely be affected negatively, and most would agree that preventing damage is important. Yet, although parties want to protect the area, they end up remolding it into a site that fulfills consumer needs. The housing communities become a way to re-create the area to further a modern consumer culture, one that stems from a colonial commercial past. As SunCal New Mexico (2007b) suggests: ‘It’s about protecting our cultural and natural resources while providing shopping and jobs all up the street or around the corner.’ Or, as one area resident argues in support of moving petroglyphs to build the extension road:

For us, this is a question of being able to go to the grocery story, the dentist, the day care, to soccer matches and so forth … They just don’t realize how much effort it took to get those two lanes. It wasn’t easy for some of us. We were respectful of Native American beliefs. We had to question ourselves to get this through. We’ve got families out here and we needed to be able to provide a quality life for them. (Siemers, 2007)

As this passage illustrates, ideologies and identities – focusing on ‘quality’ ways of life – are what ultimately need protecting and are why colonial commercial histories are ideal.

(Re)appropriating a sacred space: Private land ownership

After dropping Pueblo importance and enhancing a Spanish colonial legacy, while government advocated public ownership, developers promote ownership as an individualized private venture. Consumption is promoted specifically through individualized residential and recreational utility. Developers use the monument to advance a heightened commercialized copy, where ‘The Petroglyphs’ has become, as Davis (1996: 215, 209) argues, a ‘corporate-friendly version’ of an area that has been ‘physically produced within the context of intense consumerism’. Illustrating this point, SunCal New Mexico (2007a) asserts that its purpose is to ‘establish accessible retail districts with a wide variety of commercial uses to meet market demands and strategically position retail elements to promote walkability and efficiency’. Developers tailor the area to a buyer’s personal interests, as in: ‘Whether you are looking for a family-friendly neighborhood or a unique home site, peace and quiet or plenty of activity, The Petroglyphs will accommodate you’ (Westland Development Company, 2003c). The consumer is given ‘a place where a diversity of people, wildlife, and natural landscapes flourish together’ (Westland Development Company, 2003a). In development discourses, using the area becomes a matter of individual choice.

Developers specifically position homes as a way to tap into the area’s sacredness – a sacredness already governmentally established in the monument. Yet, as Westland Development Company (2003d) notes: ‘Ownership of the land is just the beginning.’ Ownership is framed not only through individualized notions such as ‘My back patio, My skylight, My front porch’ (Westland Development Company, 2003c), but through a (commercialized) mystic essence. The consumer is encouraged to buy a home to: ‘Be inspired … to play, to explore, to live. Etched upon rock walls and boulders of Albuquerque’s western landscape are ancient petroglyphs, inspired by the beauty and wonders of the great Southwest. Now the inspiration is yours’ (Westland Development Company, 2003c). SunCal Companies (2008a) positions its development through a unique living experience: ‘It’s just different here … It’s the kind of place where families put down roots and pride runs deep. It’s the true embodiment of community.’ SunCal New Mexico (2007c) adds that it ‘recognizes there has been no greater opportunity to revive the spirit of this historic concept’, where the goal is to ‘create a remarkable new place that will foster a unique sense of community and belonging that is absent in many modern-day neighborhoods’. In these messages, whereas government promoted research and tourist use, developers advance individualized property as a way to access the area’s (colonial and commercial) sacredness.

Within commercialized framings, developers reach back to a governmentally sanctioned ‘Petroglyphs’ to remake a new kind of place. This does not mean that government frames areas intentionally for businesses to appropriate or that governmental advocates were simply setting the stage for commercialization. Rather, prior governmental acquisition allows developers to copy a unique and sacred ‘Petroglyphs’ for individual ownership, and this takes place in a more obscure simulated process. Native and colonial histories are products of representation via a signification process and governmental messages are reappropriations. Developers can tap into the notion of an ancient sacred people and governmental protection to use the (appropriated) monument to produce a new kind of space. Developers use the area to grant wishes, spark imagination, focus on the buyer, and create a peaceful yet productive landscape that is modeled from the desert terrain. A sense of old communities and ties to ecology evoke native desert communities of the past. Modern housing tracts cannot claim to completely resemble the nature and ‘ancient cultures’ they displace because it would contradict notions of development and modernity (Wilson, 1992). Yet, developers can claim to look like, and exceed, the appropriations that came before. Residents need not worry about living in a wild, barren, undefined area; they can experience the site as a personalized commercialized recreation. What results is a sacred desert Petroglyph community that is more desert and more petroglyph-like than the deserts or ‘The Petroglyphs’ can ever be. Homebuyers then can reach back to developers’ (re)appropriated versions to create and legitimize their own sacred space. In this course, each discourse relies on the reiteration before it for power.

Conclusions

This case study illustrates how appropriations of an area, land, rocks, landscape, and Pueblo and Spanish cultures are deeply embedded within commercialized articulations, where government and developers can reconstruct representations to promote consumerism. Governmental protection and ownership are the hallmarks of public parks in the USA; yet protection and ownership can be precursors to consumerism, and not a deterrent as popularly thought. A higher cultural order becomes evident here – in Western ideologies, nature and landscape ultimately are destined to be owned and used. Here, I discuss the often obscure intersection between government and business, and I expand on contributions to the commercialized notions of landscape. I then end by addressing the possible repercussions of this process and the current debates this manuscript contributes to.

First, in arguments to create and commercialize the monument and developments, government and commerce inadvertently draw from one another in obscure ways. The highway built through the monument that displaced the petroglyphs becomes the literal and symbolic bridge between government, developers and consumers, who engage in the trafficking and flow of commercialization. In fact, when the monument was being conceptualized, the mayor’s office in Albuquerque controversially was found to be discretely courting developers to the area (Clausen, 1987). The monument’s boundaries were also designed partly around a proposed development on Westland’s property (Preservation of the Petroglyphs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1988). Here, commercial reappropriation and commodification take place in conjunction with government, which provides a copyright-free brand that developers can commercialize. Essentially, it is easier to market a special ‘Petroglyph’ housing community in a place already governmentally established as ‘The Petroglyphs’.

Commercialized appropriations such as these take place through a discrete cultural signification processes. The park became commercialized through tourist, research and artistic use, and the surrounding area is further commercialized through private home ownership. In telling similar stories, government, developers and consumers legitimize each other. The product that is extracted and sold in the park, then, is not a traditional object in nature – such as timber or minerals – but the notion of a sacred colonial commercial meaning that is tied to the rocks and land, under the guise of protecting Pueblo culture. In a move that involves ‘carefully positioning the corporation as at once a good environmental citizen and a responsible producer of goods’ (Davis, 1996: 213), developers evoke the monument’s protectionism. For example, as part of its self-ascribed ‘commitment to the environment,’ SunCal Companies (2008b) maintains that building homes nearby open spaces is integral in its goal to: ‘Whenever possible, locate open spaces next to adjoining protected open space, providing contiguous bands of natural lands for animals to roam.’ As developers seek out ‘open’ spaces, commercialization is conflated with protectionism.

There are dire repercussions to the process of commercial reappropriations of landscape, space and entities in nature. For example, in the case of the rocks themselves, in the end, through the process of hyper-consumerism, the rocks become overstuffed with meaning. The rocks are no longer important because, in the context of hyper-consumption, it is not the objects (the rocks) that matter but what they stand for (consumerism), a notion that becomes clear when moving the rocks is rationalized. Essentially, ‘The Petroglyphs’ (governmental and business reappropriations alike) have become sacred texts of a consumer identity that are used to normalize private consumption.

In addition, there are consequences to humans who spend time in national parks, homes and areas that are reconstructed in commercialized ways. In this case, private property is no longer just a place to live; instead, it becomes a mass-marketed symbol of history, land, loss, nostalgia, pride, comfort, happiness and livelihood. Home owners can tap into these meanings that government and developers put onto the area. Yet, within the context of hyper-consumerism and capitalism, that we need special places for leisure and living can be an artificial need that is posed as being natural. Monuments and housing communities can be another way to consume landscape and space. A sense of fulfillment becomes increasingly empty and difficult to obtain, where, in the context of colonialism and an enduring sense of restlessness, we must move on to the next place, hoping to find happiness somewhere. We end up searching for a space to just be, moving and altering all that is in our path and forgetting what has happened. What becomes increasingly difficult is determining how the area can be conceptualized outside of these creations. Consumerism then enables and necessitates the moving of sacred rocks to build a road through a protected park to better connect commuters who live in developments that were named after the park.

There is a deep irony in promoting a place in a highly pro-commercial way: in the process of protecting special areas, people tend to think less of how spaces have been modified. As Zagacki and Gallagher (2009: 187) argue, people in new residential developments tend to forget what was on the land before them: ‘There are no mediating material rhetorics to critically enact for residents the costs associated with razing rural spaces and constructing the housing units in which they now live or to reveal alternative uses of that commercially developed landscape.’ Material constructions of the areas displace and obscure other histories and ways to connect with and conceptualize the rocks, space and landscape.

This article also points to relevant and ongoing debates about governmental appropriation and management of public places and landscapes as well as the intersection between government and business. One recent example is the ongoing debate regarding Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s proposed Over the River art project in Colorado, where the artists are proposing to suspend six miles of fabric panels above a 42-mile stretch of the Arkansas River. The Bureau of Land Management approved the $50 million project and, with the support of politicians, artists and tourism interests, the decision was influenced by lucrative revenues that would come through tourism to the site. However, opponents are trying to block the construction, and they cite environmental and cultural repercussions. As in the case of the Albuquerque Petroglyphs, there can be a ubiquitous flow between government and business in the commercial (re)appropriation of nature and landscape.

Last, of particular concern is how people who contradict commercialization can be pushed into the periphery – in this case, those who resisted building the road and moving the rocks. This process has enabled the area to be defined and reappropriated for use in capitalistic development at the expense of Pueblo cultural meanings and values. Commercial practices can make it difficult to engage in alternative forms of being with nature, space, and landscape. If we cannot find our way out of the dominant economic and cultural structures that form commercial assumptions, we end up not truly listening to the repercussions of these practices. I end with a quote by William Weahkee who says this best in his plea against the extension road:

How can you look the other way and not look at us? And we are there, we are still there. We are still the Pueblos. We have our culture, we have our language, we have our ritual … And you guys make your decisions without us. Are we not part of the Americans? Are we not part of America? (US Senate, 1997: 48)

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I owe a special thank you to Karen Foss, Tema Milstein and Jonathan B. Hill for their assistance and support with this project.

Notes

Elizabeth Dickinson has a PhD in Communication Studies (2010, University of New Mexico, USA) and is an Assistant Professor in Communication in the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Elizabeth’s research centers on ecocultural/environmental communication, sustainability and culture.

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