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Article Excerpt
In the first decade of the twentieth century land developers and boosters promoted the Lower Rio Grande of Texas as the "Magic Valley," a place for Anglo farmers to obtain water for irrigating vegetable and citrus crops and to exploit Hispanic labor. A railroad line between Houston and Brownsville, finished in 1904, connected a place widely considered only a few years earlier as an economically worthless and culturally backward desert. The Magic Valley idea, which we consider a place myth (Shields 1991), attracted thousands of Anglo settlers to practice irrigated agriculture in a place that quickly developed into a major horticultural and citrus-producing region sustained by impoverished and segregated Hispanic workers. The Magic Valley place-name would persist for decades (Jordan 1978), even after civil rights activism and water adjudication began to erode the material basis for the place myth in the 1940s and 1950s.
We analyze the invention of the Magic Valley as a place-making process rooted in the imperative for land and water sales in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Building on recent literature on place making (Davis 2005), we focus on the origins and elements of the Magic Valley idea as place images that coalesced to form place myths. We explore the Magic Valley place myth in terms of a general notion of a booster or land developer and in terms of one person, John Shary (1872-1945), a prominent early-twentieth-century land developer and founder of the Sharyland farming subdivision in Mission and Alton, Hidalgo County. We first develop the idea of place images and place myths as comprising texts, images, and performances, which we consider a synthesis of ideas in the literatures on place making and place marketing. Next we describe the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) of Texas as an early-twentieth-century farming frontier. (1) We then identify the origins and the elements of the Magic Valley idea, analyzing relationships among material transformations of the landscape and text, image, and performance. We focus on Shary to explore how land and water sales supported the place-making imperative.
Our research design relied on archival documents in the Shary Collection at the Library of the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg and promotional pamphlets and other ephemera held mainly at the University of Texas--Austin's Center for American History. After reading these materials we developed the categories described here, often relying on comparisons of text and images among promotional ephemera. We then turned to literatures in human geography for concepts to describe the phenomena we observed, settling eventually on the idea of place image and place myth (Shields 199.1; Davis 2005). The categories we discuss do not capture the full range of place images, which include topics as varied as agricultural crops and architectural form. We derived the categories from the empirical data, rather than imposing them from theoretical literatures. Furthermore, the categories are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they often rely on each other, forming a land-sale stratagem that changed over time.
TEXT, IMAGE, AND PERFORMANCE IN PLACE MAKING AND PLACE MARKETING
Geographical analysis of the "invention" of places is well established. Language is seen as essential for the material alteration of landscapes (Tuan 1991). Numerous scholars have studied the origins, contradictions, and changes in written description of places (for example, Lewis 1988; Bassin 1991; McGreevy 1994; Gregory 1995; Duncan and Gregory 1999; Driver and Martins 2005). Human geographers have also analyzed visual imagery as a place-making device, interpreting landscape painting, photography, and cartography as ideological representations (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Gold and Ward 1994; Bassin 2000; Schwartz and Ryan 2003). Performance or spectacle is also a major force in place making. Gregory Bush, for example, was concerned with spectacle as "public ritual and commercialized entertainment that growing cities used to animate and market themselves" during the early twentieth century (1999, 155). Similarly, Steven Hoelscher examines performances of memory in defining place in the U.S. South, and Jonathan Smith views performance in the form of the Texas Aggie Bonfire as playing a critical role in reconciling two narratives of Southern identity (Hoelscher 2003; Smith 2007).
Text, image, and performance may be understood as complementary strategies for the creation of place images and place myths. Rob Shields defined place images as "various discrete meanings associated with real places and regions regardless of their character in reality" and place myths as a set of relatively stable place images (1991, 60). Building on Shields, Jeffrey Davis argues that place myths are place ideas that have "coalesced" because of their "particular coherence and longevity" (2005, 611). Whereas Davis stresses "multiple and contradictory place-myths" (p. 611), Shields emphasized temporal persistence in the content of place myths. In his conceptual model of place reproduction, Davis claims that nonlocal "discourses and place-images" create a representation of place, an "imagined landscape" that inscribes the actual landscape with place myths (pp. 610-612). These place myths "enable and legitimize social practices that alter the material landscape" (p. 612), so that the landscape comes to resemble the place myth. Davis recognizes that this occurs in numerous ways; hence the relative power of social actors is critical in determining outcomes.
We differ from Davis in one respect. Davis is interested in the interrelationships among meaning of place, social relations in place, and the production of a material landscape. He argues that the ideas of "enabling and legitimizing" material transformations come from various place images that are "quite independent" from the material landscape (Davis 2005, 611), and he develops this argument using a case study of Pacific islands that are characterized as "pristine" even though they were the sites of nuclear testing in the 1950s. Our case study, by contrast, represents a situation in which a priori material transformations, celebrated in texts, images, and performances, were essential to the creation of place myths. We add to Davis and Shields by arguing that place myths are especially likely to appear when the place is distant from centers of political and economic power, direct experience by travelers and writers with the place is brief, negative stereotypes pervade public perception of the place, and elites perceive strong potential for accumulation in terms of resource valuation. Although distance and brevity of experience make place myths possible, the negative stereotypes and the imperative for accumulation make place myths necessary.
The place-myth approach we adopt privileges elitist perspectives. We focus on place images created by people, such as land developers, railroad traffic managers, and magazine and newspaper owners, who had the capability and means to publish. These elites were not exclusively male: Julia Montgomery, a leading propagandist, wrote the most widely disseminated text promoting the LRGV (1928a; 1928b). Nevertheless, we lack knowledge of the place images held by the vast majority of the populace, especially Tejanos and Mexicans, who, as we argue, served as an abstracted category in the place images that elites created. Certainly, other residents of the LRGV may have created various place myths and place images that were not included in promotional materials; for example, a newspaper published by upper-middle-class Tejanos in the early 1900s celebrated the LRGV'S economic development while cautioning against Anglo appropriation of Tejano lands (Johnson 2003, 42-48). Some Anglo elites created place images contrary to those we discuss here during the 1920s, mainly in support of a proposed federal irrigation project that would bypass the private owners of irrigation systems.
THE LATE-NINETEENTH-AND EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY LOWER RIO GRANDE FARMING FRONTIER
Many observers considered the late-nineteenth-century Lower Rio Grande Valley to be an unruly wilderness, with economic and social life dominated by cattle ranching (Montejano 1987; Johnson 2003). Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century South Texas had changed little since 1848: Spanish was the main language, Mexican pesos were the main currency, and Hispanics (Tejanos) ran the cattle ranches and local politics. "Hispanophobia," the view of the Texas-Mexico conflict as a good-versus-evil standoff between Anglo civilization and Mexican barbarism and despotism, exacerbated economic marginalizaton (Weber 1992, 339). For example, John Bourke, a U.S. Army captain, likened the Rio Grande to the "Dark Belt" of the Congo of central Africa because of the "degraded, turbulent, ignorant, and superstitious character of its population" (1894, 594).
The invention of the Magic Valley may be situated in three main geographical and historical contexts. Railroads and land developers aggressively promoted "new" North American farming frontiers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Sakolski 1932; Gates 1934; Overton 1941; Wyckoff 1988; Ward 1998). Major railroads maintained offices dedicated to producing promotional material, and some followed the model of the Southern Pacific Lines, which created Sunset in 1898 as a place-marketing publication (Withey 1997, 314; Orsi 2005, 158-164; Sackman 2005). The 1880s demise of Texas rangelands created a large potential supply of farmland. By the early 1900s the last of the vast grazing lands were...
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