American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest

An expansive and revelatory exploration of the multicultural, water-seeking, land-destroying settlers of Great Basin and Colorado Plateau throughout history, arguing that in order to know where America is going in the time of mass migration and climate change we must understand where the Southwest has been

Albuquerque. Phoenix. El Paso. Las Vegas. Iconic American cities surrounded by desert and rust. Teeming metropolises that seem to exist independently of the seemingly inhospitable and arid landscape that surrounds them, belying the rich insight they offer into American stories of migration, industry, bloodshed, and rebirth.

Charting a geographic path along the Great Basin and the Sonoran and Moajave deserts, acclaimed journalist Kyle Paoletta maps the past and future of these cities, and the many other settlements from rural town to urban sprawl that make up the region that has come to be called ＂the American Southwest.＂ Weaving together the stories of immigrants and indigenous populations, American Oasis pulls back the layers of settlement, sediment, habit, and effect that successive empires have left on the region, from the Anasazi, Athapascan, Diné, Tewa, Apache, and Comanche, to the Spanish, Mexican, and, finally, American.

As Paoletta’s journey into the Southwest’s history becomes inextricably linked to an exploration of its dependency on water, he begins to ask: where, ultimately, will cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix find themselves once the Colorado River and its branches dry up? Richly reported and sweeping in its history, American Oasis is the story of what one iconic region’s past can tell us about our shared environmental and cultural future.

Kyle Paoletta’s reporting and criticism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, New York Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, The Believer, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Baffler, High Country News, and Boston. Kyle holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and previously worked at GQ and New York Magazine. He is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.