The general consensus among Americans (and likely people worldwide) is that by the dawn of the Twentieth Century what had become known as “the wild west” of the United States had been thoroughly tamed. The sensationalized accounts of the region popularized in the pulpy rags known as “dime novels” had by and large been deemed a thing of the past as the “civilized” world of industrialization spread westward. Yet, can a region and culture bow to the whims of popular conceit? Can the soul of a land ever truly die, or does it simply evolved into a newer version of the existing paradigm? In Luis Alberto Urrea’s essay, “Desolation Road,” an evolved, yet completely intact account of the very same “wild west” of popular culture is presented as alive
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The “UFO Café” serves the same role in the narrative as the local saloon does in most tales of the west. The establishment is even tenanted by an alluring waitress of a racially and morally ambiguous nature: “She might have been Chicana. She was bored and mean, yet every tattooed guy there seemed to know her and flirt with her. Did she go dancing with them after work? Did she ever just want to hop in a Freightliner and barrel all the way to Deming with the AC blasting?” (6-7). The women of the west, both in reality and fiction, were often far more liberated than women in the more “civilized” east and Urea’s waitress is a contemporary embodiment of the archetype. This is a woman that (in Urrea’s imagination at least) lives just on the edge of danger. This is a woman with no societal fetters to restrain her sense of freedom. She is free to flirt with the flotsam and jetsam of society with no notion of fear or trepidation, but she is also a woman that could secretly be harboring dreams of a better life beyond her economic station. The waitress herself may in reality be none of the things Urrea imagines, but it is the framework of the land and its culture that fuels his speculation. UFO burgers and bad coffee may …show more content…
The interaction between him and the Indian mother and her children provides the text’s most playful and satisfying approach to archetypes. At the moment of the highest possible danger, it is the unassuming Indian woman that inadvertently saves the day for Urrea and Johnny Bravo. After stumbling upon the encounter with the drug runners, the Indian woman calmly inquires if everything is okay. After an unsure response from Urrea, the woman “looked out at the desert hills, at the pieces of car all over the highway, at the skid marks, and back at the trembling pistoleer now pushing Johnny Bravo against the Jimmy and begging for a carton of cigarettes to spare our lives, and she said: ‘Are you sure?’” (13), the woman and clearly recognizes that there is a potentially dangerous situation at hand, yet never loses her cool. She retains her composure because, like many Native archetypes before her, she has an intrinsic understanding of her environment. She sees that the two men are clearly a bit out of their element, yet is more amused by their plight than she is concerned by it. Urrea even remarks on the woman’s amusement at the two foolish men: “I think I heard the Indian family laughing at us as they drove toward Tucson” (13). This modernization of the “wise Indian” that mocks the naïve outsiders plays beautifully into Urrea’s narrative as a modernization of an existing trope in a
The “UFO Café” serves the same role in the narrative as the local saloon does in most tales of the west. The establishment is even tenanted by an alluring waitress of a racially and morally ambiguous nature: “She might have been Chicana. She was bored and mean, yet every tattooed guy there seemed to know her and flirt with her. Did she go dancing with them after work? Did she ever just want to hop in a Freightliner and barrel all the way to Deming with the AC blasting?” (6-7). The women of the west, both in reality and fiction, were often far more liberated than women in the more “civilized” east and Urea’s waitress is a contemporary embodiment of the archetype. This is a woman that (in Urrea’s imagination at least) lives just on the edge of danger. This is a woman with no societal fetters to restrain her sense of freedom. She is free to flirt with the flotsam and jetsam of society with no notion of fear or trepidation, but she is also a woman that could secretly be harboring dreams of a better life beyond her economic station. The waitress herself may in reality be none of the things Urrea imagines, but it is the framework of the land and its culture that fuels his speculation. UFO burgers and bad coffee may …show more content…
The interaction between him and the Indian mother and her children provides the text’s most playful and satisfying approach to archetypes. At the moment of the highest possible danger, it is the unassuming Indian woman that inadvertently saves the day for Urrea and Johnny Bravo. After stumbling upon the encounter with the drug runners, the Indian woman calmly inquires if everything is okay. After an unsure response from Urrea, the woman “looked out at the desert hills, at the pieces of car all over the highway, at the skid marks, and back at the trembling pistoleer now pushing Johnny Bravo against the Jimmy and begging for a carton of cigarettes to spare our lives, and she said: ‘Are you sure?’” (13), the woman and clearly recognizes that there is a potentially dangerous situation at hand, yet never loses her cool. She retains her composure because, like many Native archetypes before her, she has an intrinsic understanding of her environment. She sees that the two men are clearly a bit out of their element, yet is more amused by their plight than she is concerned by it. Urrea even remarks on the woman’s amusement at the two foolish men: “I think I heard the Indian family laughing at us as they drove toward Tucson” (13). This modernization of the “wise Indian” that mocks the naïve outsiders plays beautifully into Urrea’s narrative as a modernization of an existing trope in a