Dry Place

Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion

2004
Author:

Patricia L. Price

Gathers tales from the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico to understand the relationship between people and place in a borderland

Patricia L. Price views the shaping of the Mexico-U.S. border through narratives that have sought to establish claims to these dry lands.

Demonstrating how stories can become vehicles for reshaping places, Price considers characters who inhabit the contemporary borderlands—ranging from longstanding figures of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Devil to a collection of lay saints embodying current concerns.

Dry Place is a well-written thought piece that pushes the boundary of how many think about borders. I highly recommend this book for cultural geographers and others with an interest in borders and identities.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Landscape is the space of negotiation between human beings and the physical world, and rarely are the negotiations more complex and subtle than those conducted through the desert landscape along the Mexico-U.S. border.

Patricia L. Price views the shaping of the landscape on and around the border through various narratives that have sought to establish claims to these dry lands. Most prominent are the accounts of Anglo-American expansionism and Manifest Destiny juxtaposed with the Chicano nationalist tale of Aztlán in the twentieth century, all constituting collective, contending claims to the U.S. Southwest. Demonstrating how stories can become vehicles for changing places and identities, Price considers characters old and new who inhabit the contemporary borderlands between Mexico and the United States—ranging from longstanding manifestations of good and evil in the figures of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Devil to a collection of lay saints embodying current concerns.

Dry Place weaves together theoretical insights with field-based inquiry, autobiography, and creative writing to arrive at a textured understanding of the bordered landscape of late modern subjectivity.


Patricia L. Price is associate professor of geography in the Department of International Relations at Florida International University in Miami.

Dry Place is a well-written thought piece that pushes the boundary of how many think about borders. I highly recommend this book for cultural geographers and others with an interest in borders and identities.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

In Dry Place, Price provides a well-researched dialogue of perspectives that offers insights into the evolution of these narratives. The book is a coherent and engaging tapestry of personal narrative, poetry, theory, and scholarship. Such a well-informed and stimulating writer.

ISLE: Studies in Literature and Environment

Price’s book is inspiring in addition to being instructive.

Journal of Historical Geography

Dry Place is an effort to understand how people who live on the border use stories, both old and new, to solidify their rights to western lands. Scholars of rhetoric and language, spatial theory, and social identity should find value in these attempts to explore cultural continuity through the structure of narrative.

Western Historical Quarterly