MEANDERING IN SOUTH PHOENIX

January 27, 2006.  Nine-ish in the morning, I began what anthropologists would call a “windshield” survey of South Phoenix.  Blacks waiting at the bus stop.  Noticeable run-down houses found in the interstices of low-end neighborhoods.  Llantera or tire shops next to a gas station.  A police officer standing next to a payphone on the side walk. Endless chain of Mexican restaurants.  Farm lands on the fringe of Dobbins road.  A sprawl of gated subdivisions etched at the foot of South Mountain with fancy pueblo style houses dotting the landscape.

As I drove through the streets of South Phoenix, it was hard for me to make sense of the place.  Is it a place that we can call, to borrow from a postmodernist’s lingo, hybrid?  Or, is the place a by-product of the city planner’s imagination?  But one thing that I am sure of is that South Phoenix represents a palimpsest of spatial, temporal, textual and cultural layers.  It is not just a trope for an inner city; it is also a place that signifies racial divide between north and south in the city of Phoenix, an idea bolstered by the Morrison Institute of Public Policy’s Hits and Misses: Fast Growth in Metropolitan Phoenix (2000:22) and more poignantly by the article of Bolin et al entitled “The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA” (2005).  Like de Certeau’s “Walking in the City,” this “windshield” tour was an act of narrative enunciation.  It allowed me to read the layers of texts inscribed in the landscape of South Phoenix.  The driving tour became an archive and a chronicle of history and urban text of South Phoenix.

One of the urban “texts” that caught my attention was the rodeo ring behind Cancun restaurant.  I was curious if there was a relationship between the performance of rodeo and Mexican identity.  I want to investigate how does the rodeo forge Mexican identity and resist American cultural hegemony.  In particular, I want to examine its performance in the context of Mexican history and tradition.