It is a
perfect sunny day in Phoenix, the kind the Convention and Visitors
Bureau uses to entice Chicagoans weary of another blustery January.
Unlike most of the visitors standing in line at the new rental car
center at Sky Harbor, however, we are not headed for the “must-see”
sites. Despite knowing this is an academic enterprise, by lunch I
am unsettled by how much we are like the tourists who passing
through that 270 million dollar break-in-bulk transit facility on 16th
Street, just beyond the bounds of South Phoenix as defined for this
class. Unlike those transients (I flatter myself), I
recognize the marketed image of the City is akin to the photo
illustration: a blend of the accurate, a vision of what will be, and
presented from a carefully chosen vantage point. Only hours in the
field on the first day, however, and already I feel an interloper.
Sky Harbor Rental Car Center
Source: http://phoenix.gov/AVIATION/support_content/rental_car_flyerweb.pdf
Cynical broadsides castigating auto-ethnography as mere navel-gazing
resonate with me at times, but I deem it appropriate to divulge my
positionality and trepidations at the outset of this venture.
Firstly, I have been writing for strictly academic audiences for
some time now, producing folderol like the preceding sentence. I am
looking forward to the challenge of writing for “the real world”
while still conveying substantive ideas. So, let me restate the
topic sentence: Sometimes
people who criticize academics who write about themselves are
correct, but I think it is a good idea to let people know “where I’m
coming from” and what concerns and interests me at the start of this
course.
The
second important thing readers must know about me is that my
attention the last few years mimics the where the eye is drawn in
this image. Symbolized by the center in the foreground, I have been
paying attention to the big ideas and projects that the City has in
the works, and the bigger patterns of the region. I am trying to
understand the perspective official Phoenix has on the changing
nature of the community. While aware of its presence, my time and
energy is drawn very quickly past the midground of South Phoenix to
the distant mountains. I have spent countless hours trying to
comprehend what is happening in Laveen, and how people there see the
reverse shot of what the City is doing to them, and how development
is challenging and changing the community’s identity. I try to
understand what concerned residents mean when they question growth
as “a threat to our way of life,” which the signs declare to be a
rural one.
