Desert Time
C.J. Alvarez: Associate Professor Mexican American and Latina-o Studies, University of Texas at Austin
There is a vast desert in the heart of North America, the biggest of its kind on the continent. This dryland is called the Chihuahuan Desert, at least by some. Most people though, in either the United States or Mexico, do not call it by any name and would be hard put to find it on a map. It is an ancient place in the midst of time-illiterate societies, a highly specialized ecosystem populated largely by people stricken with environmental amnesia. This talk is about the history of the desert which is, depending on how you measure, over 8,000 years old. There is no academic discipline, calendrical system, or common vocabulary available to describe this length of time, the lifespan of the desert. This talk proposes, with trepidation and humility, several ways of organizing desert time in the absence of any intrinsically meaningful schema and in the face of a human-centered worldview that too often dominates our imaginations and impoverishes our feel for the world outside our species.
