Kyle Paoletta
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kyle Paoletta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is very much having grown up in New Mexico and then lived and worked on the East Coast in New York and Boston for the better part of two decades. And what happens when you're from the Southwest and you spend a lot of time, especially in the people in the rest of the country know about the place you're from.
And the sort of broad generalities that, you know, maybe someone's visited the Grand Canyon. Maybe they went to Santa Fe once. They have a grandparent or an uncle who retired to Phoenix. There's sort of like these touchstones that people have. But there's also this broad ignorance that stems from, I think, what you were talking about a little bit in the intro of this
this sense of the Southwest as a very kind of foreboding, unwelcoming geography that how could people live there? How can there be those cities there? And so I think part of what made me really want to kind of return home in a way and have a deeper engagement with the history of the region was really wanting to both explain the Southwest to the rest of the country and help people understand
the process through which all that land that was incorporated into the country through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, how it was integrated into the country, as well as to kind of help the Southwest understand itself. Because I think so many people I grew up with are pretty new to the region.
I mean, my grandmother's family first came there in the 1910s, but plenty of people moved to Las Vegas last year and have no real sense of the history of this place that is you know, some of the fastest growing part of the country still.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's an excellent question. And as I've talked about the book, I think Phoenix's emergence as an enormous metropolis is something that continually surprises people.
And certainly when it surpassed Philadelphia as the fifth largest city in the country, I think that was like a watershed moment for a lot of Americans of like, wait a second, like, Phoenix is better than Philadelphia? How did that happen? Yeah. So I think the story really starts with the ancestral Sonoran peoples who first lived along the Salt River in what's now central Arizona.
And the Salt is a, unlike the Rio Grande or the Colorado, is... a somewhat less stable river there are some years where it flows you know very rapidly and is a quite impressive river and many years when it runs dry so it's a much more the salt river is a less regular companion for civilization than yeah maybe other rivers are.
So these ancestral peoples dug these irrigation canals and some kind of rudimentary dams and did a lot of these earthworks that allowed them to support some of the most vast agricultural area in what's now the United States in the pre-Columbian era. And so that was roughly 500 to 1500 CE. And so that kind of laid a foundation.
And then there were some climactic changes where those peoples migrated to other rivers, primarily the Gila and the Santa Cruz. And then after Guadalupe Hidalgo, You have Anglo settlers coming in the 1870s who discovered these irrigation canals. And that becomes, that is why it's called Phoenix. It's the sense of where it is a civilization reborn, where this supposedly banished people was.
Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, in addition to those peoples in what's now Arizona, there were, of course, the Pueblo people primarily in New Mexico and along the Rio Grande and some of its tributaries where there were dozens of villages when the Spanish first got there, when Coronado, you know, led his expedition out of Mexico into what's now the Southwest.
and that those people also had a very long history. And there's evidence of trade between the Pueblos, the people of the rivers in Arizona, and Central Mexico with what became the Aztec civilization and so on. So there was very much a thriving culture. And you can today visit the ruins of Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon and see these really incredible
cliff dwellings that those peoples developed around 1100 and see that for them living in the desert was about making do with very scant resources and many lived very communally. Many pueblos are effectively huge apartment complexes. Right. And so what happened with Anglo settlement is very much an importation of a lifestyle from not just the Midwest and the Northeast, but from Europe.
And this sense of we can take this place and turn it into Europe. something that's more familiar east of the Mississippi as where you get this dictum of the rainfall follows the plow, which was very popular in the Manifest Destiny era that simply by cultivating land, you would turn it temperate and you would turn it into good agricultural land.
And even the Bureau of Reclamation, which is responsible for the Hoover Dam and much of the water infrastructure in the West, the name reclamation comes from the idea that there is some past version of the land that was facilitated mass agriculture. We simply have to reclaim it. We're not changing the environment. We're returning it to some idea of what it used to be.
Yeah, I mean, I think the history of Phoenix is a history of using up all of the water available and then reaching further to another water source. So it starts with the Salt River and irrigating the Salt River. And very rapidly, Phoenix becomes a kind of premier agricultural center, certainly in the region, but throughout the West.
And what happens, as I mentioned at the beginning, the Salt River is a very irregular river. And so they have sort of the first decade in the 1870s is a boom time. There's regular rain, good snowpack. They're able to really expand what's under cultivation very rapidly. The next decade is a drought. And...
It's probably the only time in Phoenix's history where it lost population, where people said like, oh, this isn't work. I'm going to go to California. And so you have this sort of like immediate challenge. And then the boom times recumb so much so that there's a massive flood that destroys the first railroad bridge in Phoenix.
So all of that becomes part of why Theodore Roosevelt founds the Bureau of Reclamation is this idea of we need to even out the water. We need to make it possible so that when there's boom years, we can... hold on to that to use in the years when there isn't as much rain or snow.
And so the first dam that the Bureau of Reclamation builds is now called the Roosevelt Dam in the mountains kind of northeast of Phoenix. And that reservoir becomes what allows Phoenix to really begin growing because it gives it a very sustainable water source.
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