Joseph E. Taylor III

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Joseph E. Taylor III | The Many Lives of the New West | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.2 | The History Cooperative

The Many Lives of the New West

References to a "New West" have grown in recent years, but it is unclear what is new or western about the changes attributed to the region. Moreover, the "New West" has a long and troubling history, and scholars should carefully consider the term's masking and isolating tendencies before invoking it.

"There is no institutional memory in the West, only dawn."¹

Lately a lot of people have been treating the American West, a region that has been conquered and colonized repeatedly over half a millennium, like a bright, shiny dime. The West, so the story goes, became a brave new world some twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. Writer Raye Ringholz, journalists Timothy Egan and David Olinger, geographers William Riebsame and Peter Walker, historians Patricia Limerick and William Wyckoff, economists Ed Whitelaw and Thomas Power, and law professor Charles Wilkinson cite changes in the region's economic, social, and cultural face as the dawning of a New West, and all attribute these transformations to capital and technology.² The declining importance of resource extraction and rise of the Internet, light industry, and tourism has indeed altered the West. Shifts in economic and cultural power have been dramatic, yet arguments about an intrinsically new or different West stumble on many counts. Most developments are national in scope, many of the propelling forces are far from new or revolutionary, and few effects are universal. This New West is ultimately both less and more than it seems: at once a marketing tool for a classist, urban fantasy about the pastoral countryside and a romantic elision of the dark side of gentrification.

The shortcomings of New West declarations carry us only so far. In this strange era of the post-industrial, post-modern, post-dot.com, and post-9/11, it is easy to pick the bones of last year's prophesies. Rents in chic San Francisco fell by a third in 2001, and Oregon suffered the distinction of having the nation's highest unemployment rate through 2002, all because the digital bubble burst. This was the same economy that prophets said would permanently relieve western hinterlands of their dependence on extractive industry. If western history teaches that booms have busts, and newspapers show that New West themes engulf the nation, then rather than dwell on the historical and geographical myopia of boosters, let us instead focus on the long, rich history of the New West trope and place its latest incarnation in social and environmental context. I may be wrong; I might have to live this down the rest of my career, but I want to explain why scholars should eschew New West in favor of other categories of analysis.³

Beyond the analytical failings of newness and westerness lay more disturbing issues. Although smart people hail the New West as a place where people and nature will thrive like never before, most changes reveal persisting weaknesses in environmental and social justice. Gentrification and recreational tourism, forces that are as fractured and diffuse as they are powerfully transformative, tear the social and cultural fabric of rural communities, and the pain is felt primarily by minority and blue-collar residents.⁴ The emphasis on New West environmental amenities also fueled a rush of exurban settlement that accelerated consumption of natural resources and fragmentation of ecosystems. In so many ways the New West, with its ongoing marginalization of labor, degradation of nature, and implementation of homogeneity, seems a helluva lot like the Old West. From missionaries to Mormons and '49ers to equity refugees, westerners have been trying to simplify the West into monochromatic societies; and from Chinatown to the Barrio and Albina to the Res, the West has been America's most effectively segregated region for a very long time.⁵ Drive through Park City, Sunriver, or Mendocino, and it is hard to see this latest New West as a break with that past.

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