walled gardens
unceded land of the yavapai people (prescott, az); unceded land of the cahuilla people (palm springs, ca); octavia butler's utopia within a dystopian california
Prescott, AZ in December. “America’s Hometown,” some local boosters parochially decided it should boast. And “Arizona’s Christmas City.” Miles of tinsel and candycane swag and flimsy inflatable Christmas characters up a week or so before Thanksgiving, even; scant weeks since the official orange and green and purple Halloween tat came down (finally silencing the clowns kitty-corner from my mom’s place, which kept up a fugue of creepy monologues night and day for over a month).
Now the the town square’s trees are swaddled in every color of lights, arches set up down one walkway for selfie opportunities. “It looks fabulous,” remarks old buddy Robert, “or at least that’s what I’d call it.”
“When you go to the grocery store, does it feel like a retirement community to you?” my mom asked earlier. I agree. “That’s what I noticed when I first moved here, in my fifties. Everyone was older than me.”
Robert comes with me to jazz night at the Raven. In the depths of the bar, it’s the usual Prescott crowd: grey and white hair, polo shirts, down vests over barrel chests, some cowboy boots and hats. The crowd mumble tunes baritone; there are more men in the room than women.
Robert has his eye on a muscular, bearded guy in the standing-room-only crowd in front of us, who has a black-and-white American flag on his well-fitted sleeve. “Some hot daddies around here,” he murmurs. “I have to catch myself.”
“NO,” I warn him. “That’s a Founding Fathers shirt he’s wearing. That’s the place where the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers meet in the back room. Those are Danger Daddies.”
* * *
A road trip from Prescott to Palm Springs. Fields of white tri-blade windmills marching off to the horizon. Mounts San Jacinto and San Gorgonio provide a comforting end to the desert’s infinity. They rise at the end of the street grid at an angle so similar to the steep rise of the San Gabriels that kept watch over our childhoods, Robert’s and mine, yet the facets of their crowns and their relationship to the sun say no, we are near to them, but we are not your mountains.
Open land around Palm Springs is relatively tidy, splashed with purple: desert sage, Robert thinks, but he’s not sure. People have been saying it’s because the rains were so abundant this year. The Cahuilla tribe owns much of the city, Robert tells me, and they lease the land out. They seem to do pretty well. They run the casinos, and a really nice spa, too.
We visit the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum. It is a beautiful new space, beginning in a round room where an animation of Cahuilla creation myths plays on the walls and floor. There are intricate baskets in golds, decorated with snakes and flowers and other motifs in reds and blacks. There are clay ollas for watering and carrying. Soft-looking gold sandals made from yucca fiber.
Then the museum tells who came and changed things. First the Spanish, with their missions. We Cahuilla did not choose to go into the missions, mostly, the exhibit says, preferring to keep our own customs and adopt only what we thought was helpful. Few people were baptized. Then it became Mexico, and the missions became more brutal in their approach. We retreated into the mountain canyons, Andreas and Tahquitz, to keep to ourselves and live in our way. And the Americans came and called our land theirs. It was stolen from us. They put our children in boarding schools, disrupting the transmission of knowledge. By the 1950s there were not many people left who could teach the bird chants and old skills. So the elders burned the big house that was the seat of that knowledge.
But we owned the land and businesses in town, and we sat on the city council, and we sent our children to college, and we opened the casinos. And we planned this museum, and the spa that uses our healing practices. And here, here is the picture of us breaking ground on the museum.
We. The most striking thing about this museum is that throughout it, its curatorial voice says we, not “those people back then.” It is a remarkable thing, to be in a museum that was made by the people represented therein.
I have an uncle whose family was from towns not far from Palm Springs. (As it happens, his name is also Robert.) My white settler family has always referred to his side of the family as Mexican-American. My Great-Uncle Paul, a political scientist who worked for Nixon and Reagan but still really ought to have known better, once commented to Uncle Robert about some change in policy, immigration or economic, implying that being from Mexico he expected Robert to feel some kind of way about it.
My family lived here before it was America, responded Uncle Robert, unruffled.
I once asked Uncle Robert, we studied Spanish when we were younger—why didn’t you speak Spanish around us?
There wasn’t really anyone to speak it to, he said.
Was I asking the wrong question?
Young Robert and I and our friends, we also had the transmission of knowledge disrupted. Because we both chose to take two languages our freshman year of high school, we had gotten out of California History class. We had never heard of the Cahuilla.
* * *
Outside the earth tones of the museum, the turquoise and magenta retro decor of the shops is disorienting.
Young Robert and his husband Bill have left Seattle and moved to Palm Springs for the gay community here. They’re taking it slow, trying out a number of enclaves before they decide where to buy. Their current place is in a complex where the big glass midcentury-modern doors open straight onto a golf course. The jewel green of its grass is at odds with the mountains beyond, which are the muted colors of Coahuilla ollas and baskets.
I’m struck by how open the bright white architecture seems designed to be. Anyone can see right in the windows. Older men and sometimes women stroll by in polos and shorts, and wave to neighbors inside. It’s almost as if it were designed for elegant neighborhood-wide parties. It feels discoherent with the walls around the complex; or maybe only made possible by those walls; or.
They take me to two leather stores; the Marilyn Monroe statue; and a bar they say is an institution in the area. I notice my defenses rise the moment I approach the nearest six-top table outside. It’s all older men. Down-vested, barrel-chested. There are more men in this enormous venue than I have ever seen in one place; hundreds of them, and maybe only a half-dozen women. The crowd mumble tunes baritone. I think for a moment I am back in Prescott.
But a second vibe check yields no feeling of threatening machismo at all. Not one eye batted at my presence. This entire room is full of gay men. There’s Abba on the enormous video screens. An aging twink trots around with mylar birthday balloons tied to his back belt loop, then impishly mimes that they are enormous testicles.
What percentage of Palm Springs is gay, do you think? I ask Robert.
I think it’s over 50 percent, he says.
* * *
I’m struck by the percentage of Palm Springs neighborhoods that are gated. Many of them titled “Estates” or even “The Colony.” The heads of palm trees soar above them, magenta bougainvillea spills over, but many of the low modern houses can’t be seen behind walls. The opening chapters of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower—written in response to the Rodney King unrest—come back to me in vivid detail: the argument over whether, in the face of corporate monopolies hoarding the basic necessities of life and a desperate population of unfed, unhoused people looting and setting fires in drug-fueled rage, it makes more sense for the residents of struggling gated communities to arm and defend themselves, hunkered down where they are, or take to the road to find a better place up north.
Before she leaves her gated community, Octavia Butler’s heroine teaches herself to make bread with flour ground from the narrow, pointed acorns of live oak trees, the way the first peoples of California did.
Writing in 1991, Octavia Butler invented a conservative Christian leader whose slogan was “Make America Great Again.”
“Octavia Butler called it,” the internet muses to itself.