Checkerboarding the Desert
The Mojave National Preserve, by landownership (1994).
My first book project, Checkerboarding the Desert, is an ethnography of the landownership checkerboard, the spatial technology that defines California’s East Mojave Desert. The book examines the history of conflict over the California checkerboard (alternately owned mile-by-mile sections in the desert). The checkerboard--and contestation over it--are at the center of conflicts over contemporary water projects, large-scale conservation acquisitions, and the protection of Native American sacred sites. Drawing on more than two and a half years of fieldwork with the Native American Land Conservancy, the Mojave Desert Land Trust, and others involved in contemporary land management in the desert, the book traces the history of the checkerboard and its future.
The book argues that the American Dream and its concomitant idea of property failed in the California desert, where a large grant of checkerboarded lands to the transcontinental railroad was intended to promote settlement and profit through sale. The checkerboard was conceived as a project of American Empire that was supposed to erase its tracks as it transformed the desert into a landscape of private property and picket fences. But the checkerboard remained unsold; it persisted for more than a century, even as few marks of the checkerboard appeared on the ground. The mismatch between its lived reality and legal persistence enabled the continued presence of Chemehuevis and Mojaves on its lands, and for the later repossession of Mamápukaib by the Native American Land Conservancy.
The book follows how the the checkerboard became the enemy of conservationists and land managers in the late twentieth century as it enabled extraction and destruction in a landscape that some considered a wasteland without value. This study takes the checkerboard as a starting point to understand the East Mojave not only as a wasteland where development failed, but rather as a gameboard that sets the conditions of contemporary environmentalism and historical preservation efforts. Through examining contemporary efforts to save the desert from development, extraction, and the desecration of sacred sites, I examine the complex relationships between Native American peoples and settler society. In so doing, the book contributes to scholarship on the intersections of Native American Studies and settler society, the legal and financial aspects of contemporary environmentalism, and the politics of land in the rural United States.
The book draws on research conducted as part of longstanding partnerships with the Native American Land Conservancy (an intertribal land trust) and the Mojave Desert Land Trust. During my research, I also collaborated with local historical societies in the Morongo Basin and Coachella Valley and conducted extensive archival research in Southern California and Arizona. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of California Human Rights Center, and the UC Natural Reserve System.
The book argues that the American Dream and its concomitant idea of property failed in the California desert, where a large grant of checkerboarded lands to the transcontinental railroad was intended to promote settlement and profit through sale. The checkerboard was conceived as a project of American Empire that was supposed to erase its tracks as it transformed the desert into a landscape of private property and picket fences. But the checkerboard remained unsold; it persisted for more than a century, even as few marks of the checkerboard appeared on the ground. The mismatch between its lived reality and legal persistence enabled the continued presence of Chemehuevis and Mojaves on its lands, and for the later repossession of Mamápukaib by the Native American Land Conservancy.
The book follows how the the checkerboard became the enemy of conservationists and land managers in the late twentieth century as it enabled extraction and destruction in a landscape that some considered a wasteland without value. This study takes the checkerboard as a starting point to understand the East Mojave not only as a wasteland where development failed, but rather as a gameboard that sets the conditions of contemporary environmentalism and historical preservation efforts. Through examining contemporary efforts to save the desert from development, extraction, and the desecration of sacred sites, I examine the complex relationships between Native American peoples and settler society. In so doing, the book contributes to scholarship on the intersections of Native American Studies and settler society, the legal and financial aspects of contemporary environmentalism, and the politics of land in the rural United States.
The book draws on research conducted as part of longstanding partnerships with the Native American Land Conservancy (an intertribal land trust) and the Mojave Desert Land Trust. During my research, I also collaborated with local historical societies in the Morongo Basin and Coachella Valley and conducted extensive archival research in Southern California and Arizona. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of California Human Rights Center, and the UC Natural Reserve System.
Golden Dirt: How Dirt Biking Remade California's Land
My second book project traces the emergence of off-road vehicle use in the California desert as a land use problem. Broadly, I argue that this important issue--“the hidden thing that no one talks about,” as one environmentalist interlocutor put it--reshaped land management by focusing attention on an issue that was consumptive, but not productive. Drawing on ethnographic research, interviews, and archival research conducted across California, the book lays out a new way of considering a recreational geography through debates over how to regulate a new use both at the state and federal levels.
Articles are slowly trickling out: A piece in Bay Nature laid out the early history of dirt biking in the Panoche Hills. In a forthcoming edited volume, I follow the history of the sacrifice zone through the linkages between the agricultural sciences and off-highway vehicle use. An article in Geoforum examines the intersection of administrative law and dirt biking through impossible evidence.
Articles are slowly trickling out: A piece in Bay Nature laid out the early history of dirt biking in the Panoche Hills. In a forthcoming edited volume, I follow the history of the sacrifice zone through the linkages between the agricultural sciences and off-highway vehicle use. An article in Geoforum examines the intersection of administrative law and dirt biking through impossible evidence.
The Cadiz Project: Zombie Infrastructure and Regulatory Alchemy
My research on the Cadiz water project has spanned public-facing journalism and academic writing, tracing the cultural histories of the Cadiz Water Project in relation to the cultural politics of water and railroad history in the California desert. Intersecting with the book's themes of railroad checkerboarding and legal geography, "Zombie Infrastructure" traces how contemporary zombie projects--like Cadiz--rely on reanimating past legal infrastructures and the corporate power of the railroad in order to create a contemporary project. "Regulatory Alchemy" traces cultural conceptions of water transfer alongside legal geographies of groundwater to articulate a concept at the heart of contemporary environmental impact reporting. My other work on Cadiz can be found in my publications.
Other Projects
I am working on a project about the history and legacies of the Small Tract Act in Southern California.
