Rural place attachment in Hispano urban centers

Since the end of World War II, American cities have attracted ever greater numbers of new residents in search of diverse employment opportunities and amenity-rich environments. (1) Since the early 1980s, Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix have consistently topped the list of the fastest-growing urban centers in the United States. With surrounding lands being gobbled up at a rate of more than an acre an hour, rapid urbanization is coming at a heavy environmental and social price (Stoel 1999; Theobald 2001). As recent news headlines assert, for many people cities have become a stress-inducing, inhospitable, and impersonal environment with polluted air, rampant road rage, heinous hate crimes, sprawl, and traffic congestion (Muir 1999). Cities are popularly perceived as the root of many a social ill. Conversely, rural areas are regarded as warm and friendly places where one can escape the urban jungle and find peace, solace, and comfort (de Wit 1997; Jakle 1999). As sanctuaries that possess restorative powers, rural places have become an idyllic retreat from the "increasingly urbanized and fast-paced world beyond" (Wyckoff and Dilsaver 1995, 4). One way urbanites deal with the "evils" of living in urban centers is by incorporating nonurban practices into their daily lives. Just as the romanticized country life centers on reclaiming the purported serenity of nature, rural small-town places can offer a nurturing, extended-family atmosphere where residents personalize their relationships and forge strong ties to place (Jakle 1999). Living in a city can be more tolerable when one is surrounded by reminders of the presumably peaceful, caring, wholesome virtues of a rural lifestyle (Little 1999). A link between rural and urban places is evident, then, in my exploration of rural place identification among urban-dwelling Hispanos in Albuquerque, Espanola, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Pueblo, Colorado. (2) LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS MOVES TO THE CITY American cultural geographers are renowned for their meticulous examinations of the built environment (Wagner and Mikesell 1962; Norton 1989; Foote and others 1994; Myers and others forthcoming). For decades geographers with a cultural focus have also interpreted patterns of ordinary cultural landscapes (Meinig 1979a; Groth and Bressi 1997), including the work of such well-known scholars as Peirce Lewis (1979), Donald Meinig (1979b), J. B. Jackson (1984, 1994), Allen Noble (1992), Wilbur Zelinsky (1992), and Terry Jordan, Jon Kilpinen, and Charles Gritzner (1997). The majority of these "traditional" pieces have focused on the attributes of rural, folk, or preindustrial societies. As James Duncan (1990) and others have acknowledged, the methodologies and corpus of knowledge advanced by this approach to cultural geographical research have provided a solid foundation and a tested set of axioms on which the future of the sub discipline can be built. Increasing urbanization, however, combined with a call for the application of more socially grounded and theoretically based investigations, is precipitating a shift in the research agenda of today's largely "new" cultural geographers (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Jackson 1989; Cosgrove 1993,1994; Duncan and Ley 1993; Holdsworth 1993; Duncan 1994; Mitchell 1994). Social interaction in urban and industrial places helps drive the research of some present-day cultural geographers (Ley 1996; Hayden 1997; Wheeler 1998; Peach 2002). Furthermore, the 1990s witnessed a growing number of scholars who explored the complexity of urban centers (Muir 1999; Myers and others forthcoming), especially those who sought to understand the role of landscape in the development of culture (Mitchell 1994; Wheeler 1998). Interpreting urban patterns of ethnicity (Arreola 1994; Ruddick 1996; Wood 1997; Li 1998), gender relations (Hayden 1981; Watson 1986; Spain 1992; Fincher and Jacobs 1998), employment and class (Mitchell 1993; Blake a nd Arreola 1996; Bondi 1998; Hiebert 1999), social and political economy (Harvey 1989; Zukin 1995; Mitchell 1996; Warren 1996; Kloosterman, Van der Leun, and Rath 1999), and development, cons umption, and commercialization (Kenny 1995; Smith 1996) is proving to be a rich area for research. …