Some Thoughts About the Desert Landscape After Reading Natalie Koch’s Arid Empire and Seeing Sofía Córdova's “Sin Agua”

I wrote this post last spring and never got around to putting it online. Sofía Córdova's “Sin Agua” just closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, so I thought it was about time to post it...

On a chilly day in March, I was sitting with Greg in the Juan Santa Cruz picnic area in Tucson Mountain Park, re-reading Natalie Koch’s Arid Empire and feeling the sun’s steady heat on my back. There were ravens flapping overhead, calling to one other, and enough red rock that I began to notice its resonance with the cover of Koch’s book. The dust jacket features white lettering superimposed on an image of a desert city. The sky, the earth, and the city itself are tinted reddish brown. 

After we'd been there for a few minutes, we heard a voice call “Quiet on the set" down in the big wash to our left, and there was an unintelligible babble of voices from a group of filmmakers we had seen on our way into the park. We knew nothing about the film they were making, but this location was an obvious one for anything with a “western” theme. I had seen nearly identical saguaros and low brown mountains in lots of TV shows when I was a child. They don’t make so many Westerns now, but Koch, who was born and raised in Tucson, says about her childhood, “When we were growing up, the Sonoran Desert surrounding Tucson had become the most iconic landscape representing the Wild West in English-language film and television – and we were tremendously proud of it.” (Koch, 14) But she says she is no longer so proud of these attitudes she once shared, and her book helps to explain how people came to view the Sonoran Desert landscape as they did and the problems those attitudes created.

In Arid Empire Koch makes the point consistently that the takeover of the American West was part of the colonization of the rest of what is now the United States. But the methods used here were different because of the heat and lack of water. The cover of Arid Empire was taken from, it turns out, one half of the August 1975 Arizona Highways magazine cover. 

That cover, in turn, came from a painting by Robert T. McCall that is described by Koch in a recent video presentation as “a utopian vision of what the Arizona desert could look like and maybe for some people it does look like today.” In the sky of the original image there's an emphatic sun shedding rays of intense light as some kind of aircraft flies overhead; there are buttes and mesas in the background and saguaros in the foreground, and the city itself is depicted as a shining place with tall buildings, a highway etched into the landscape, and other modern structures. The original image by McCall had a more varied palette than Koch’s book cover, and in it the sky and the land seem to reflect the sun’s yellow-brown tint as if baked to a golden tan by its energy. The buildings and other infrastructure shine white against this golden color, and only the saguaros hold a hint of green. On the cover of Koch’s book, on the other hand, these varied colors are more consistently reddish-brown like the color of some of the rock near where we were sitting, which is called Recreation Red Bed and is described by geologists as “massive fine-grained brick red sandstone.” To my eye, you could call the color brick, but you might also call it copper or russet. 

Lizard on red rock

When we went over to look down into the wash to see some of the rock and maybe to spot a few members of the film crew, we saw nobody but a chuckwalla basking on an outcrop. But the reddish color of the rock also brought to my mind images I've seen of the Martian landscape; the connection between our desert and science fiction imagery seems hard to get away from. Of course this color can be seen most intensely in the red rock country near Sedona, but it can also be found in countless other places in our state. But even though this dry and rocky terrain brings extraterrestrial vistas to my mind, I know that Arizona is not an alien landscape to the indigenous people who have lived here for thousands of years. And those who focus on Arizona's otherworldliness are often likely to see this land as a place to be taken over and repurposed, just as they think they would like to do on Mars.

Still from "Sin Agua" by Sofia Córdova

After we had looked at the red rock and sat back down at our picnic bench, I could hear the voices of the film crew in the nearby wash again, and this in turn made me think about “Sin Agua” – waterless – a sound and video installation by Sofía Córdova that we had seen at the Tucson Museum of Modern Art the week before. Just as Koch does, Córdova also talks about colonialism in regard to the desert Southwest. But Cordova compares what she finds in Arizona with what she has experienced at home in Puerto Rico, a place still treated like an American colony, whereas Koch connects colonialism here with colonialism in the Arabian Peninsula. And like me, each of these women is an outsider, not native to this place, a visitor to this historically and ecologically complex place.

There are similarities to the points of view put forward by Koch and Córdova, though their ways of expressing those points of view are very different. Both address water issues and both women are disturbed by the science fiction/utopian promise some people like to attribute to the Southwestern United States. Each woman sees these attitudes as part of a colonial mindset that hopes to appropriate a place that was already someone’s home. According to Koch, camels and date palms from the Arabian Peninsula were imported to Arizona to encourage settlers to see this desert as a "Miniature Holy Land" on which "[c]olonization was made friendlier by conceiving of it as a pilgrimage, an act of return." (Koch, 13) Koch who was born and raised in Tucson, says, "My early romance with the desert is not guilt free. It is an achievement. It is the result of the calculated effort of generations of settlers -- and their camels, horses, and mules -- who created the conditions for me to call Arizona home and to personally live out their vision of civilization in the desert." (Koch, 16) As I read this, I realized that her description applied to me, too. But while Koch and I experience this desert as beneficiaries of colonialism, Córdova experiences it as a person from Puerto Rico who has seen firsthand the consequences of colonialism.

Landscape in Tucson Mountain Park

According to the artist's statement about “Sin Agua” on Córdova's website, her research into the colonialism which destroyed water systems in Indigenous Arizona helped her understand how that destruction affects present-day access to water. These ideas are merged into her films. Also layered into this particular work were her anxieties about the arrival of Hurricane Maria in her homeland of Puerto Rico during the time she was in Arizona. "Sin Agua" doesn't process these ideas sequentially and Córdova's voiceover, which is both in Spanish and English, layers a mosaic narrative over a complex montage of footage that includes images from Hollywood films, views from the windows of cars, trips to tourist destinations, and scenes of unidentified people dancing. Hard truths find their way into the effects "Sin Agua" has on the audience, despite its constant turns in unexpected directions (including images of Marlene Dietrich in The Garden of Allah, Martha and the Vandellas singing "Heatwave," footage of an albino rattlesnake, and more).

Córdova calls "Sin Agua" an "anti-documentary trilogy," and each of three parts to the piece is shown on a separate screen in the viewing room, though not, of course, simultaneously. Córdova says right away that she has never been so thirsty as she was in Phoenix, that so much water is wasted there in spite of the fact that water is a scarce resource. She was in Phoenix to make this piece, yet she was distracted by her worries about her home in Puerto Rico where a hurricane was brewing. She presents us with a stark contrast between Puerto Rico as an island awaiting drenching rain and Phoenix as the capital of drought, a slow-motion natural disaster that is made more annoying to Córdova by the arrogance of some of the people who live there.

My musings about “Sin Agua” were interrupted as a voice yells “Cut” nearby, and the members of the film crew begin to laugh and talk animatedly. Ravens continue to soar overhead and croak down at us. “Let’s take stuff we know we’re not going to need in the next scene,” someone says. Greg and I gather our things and begin to leave the park, warmed by the sun and impressed as always by the richness of the desert landscape.

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Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia by Natalie Koch, 2023, Verso