You Had to Be There

Everyone warned me about the tourists when I first moved to Marfa. I chalked that up to townie snobbery until I spent an underemployed afternoon at a coffee shop not far off the main drag. The barista and I happily ignored each other until two young women blew in like tumbleweeds, dragging a bulky vintage shutter camera and an enormous white dog. “This place is incredible,” one of them gasped, as though she had never seen a coffee shop before. The women traded the camera rig back and forth as they draped themselves over tables and against the decor, the kind of industrial Southwest-lite one could find in any number of cafés from Austin to Tucson to Santa Fe. Without bothering to ask permission, they snapped pictures of the barista, who may as well have been a potted succulent. They didn’t order coffee. Instead they asked, “Where can we buy a bull skull?”

“A bowl skull?”

“No, a bull skull—like one you could glue cool rocks to?”

The barista suggested looking in a field.

I imagined these women out on the range in their immaculate white outfits, hunting for the perfect corpse. Then I was seized by a mortifying thought: Did I look like that, with my out-of-state plates, my Midwestern accent, my boots that had barely known horseshit?

That’s when I started seeing them everywhere. Tourists. I’d never seen them before because, until fairly recently, I’d been one. I used to think everyone I saw in Marfa lived here year-round, inexplicably dressed for Coachella in a place where the main industries are cattle ranching and border defense. You can tell the outsiders by their skin; no one who’s lived in the desert for more than a week ever looks that dewy. Locals wear big hats to prevent their noses from broiling; tourists sport sunburns and curiously dust-free Stetsons. Locals wear clothes that skew Western; tourists wear flowing, cult-white caftans or the glitzy outfits of Nashville country stars. Even if you have a job or a residency that gives you good reason to be new in town, you can still feel, from one day to the next, either like the dead bull in the field or the outsider hawking its bedazzled skull on Etsy.

Jeffrey Yang’s Hey, Marfa (2018), culled from notebooks the poet kept during his Lannan fellowship in town, dissects the community’s many contradictions. For all the talk of the town’s high desert landscape as a wellspring of artistic inspiration, most Marfans don’t recognize themselves in art made about them. Whether in classic films such as Giant (1956), or the more recent Amazon series I Love Dick, set in Marfa, the real people who forge lives out here figure as little more than extras. The Marfa travelogue is its own insufferable mini-genre: white urbanites fly in from far away to “find themselves” and torment the ladies at Marfa Burrito with broken Spanish. Yang’s writing about the history of the West, particularly the nonwhite laborers who built the region brick by brick and tie by tie, is a welcome change from out-of-towners breathlessly debating whether Marfa is still cool. (At Yang’s first reading of the book in town, one longtime resident exclaimed, “Thank God you haven’t written another Styles section piece about us!”)

A self-proclaimed “interloper / who dares to add / these grains to the sands,” Yang, who lives in the Hudson Valley, takes on alternating personas of unimpressed outsider, spellbound newcomer, and extraterrestrial scholar looking down on West Texas from both the future and the distant past. Using an array of poetic forms and source material ranging from radio interviews to 19th century diaries, Yang subverts the legacies of the travelogue, the Western, and the hyperallusive Modernist epic in hopes of capturing a Marfa that’s more honest than what local Airbnb listings will sell you. His vision of the contemporary Southwest, a region where the carceral and surveillance states run amok, raises important questions about the use of poetry as a medium for political commentary. When artists stake their claim in the blood and dust of the real Texas borderlands, what responsibility do they have to the people they’re writing about? Whose dead are they allowed to raise?

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Hey, Marfa belongs to the ongoing renaissance of documentary poetry. Alongside poets such as Layli Long Soldier, Solmaz Sharif, and Daniel Borzutzky, Yang uses archival material and contemporary news sources to engage fact with linguistic play. The differences between nonfiction poetry and more traditional lyric forms are often largely structural: docupoets act as curators, juxtaposing sources to illuminate the humanity and complexity of their subjects. The documentary poem, like any other poem, draws power from the electricity of its language, but texts such as C.D. Wright’s One Big Self (2007) or The Work-Shy (2016), by the anonymous poet-scholar collective Blunt Research Group, also ask readers to consider their political paradigms. Knowing who the poet is and how the text was assembled offers information about these poems that might dead-end in other poetic genres. Reading “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” for instance, isn’t necessarily enhanced by knowing that Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Knowing that Yang was in town for a brief stint and did much of his research remotely is essential to evaluating this text. Hey, Marfa pivots on the position of poet-as-outsider, a tradition dating back to the troubadour and the flâneur, but with a distinctly 21st-century twist.

If lyric poetry is intricate embroidery radiating from a single stitch, then docupoetry is a kind of quilting. In Yang’s quilt, cowboys and conquistadors tangle with aboriginal Australians and men executed by the state of Texas. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Octavio Paz all make cameos, dead poets rumbling through the underbrush with the javelinas. A text this far-reaching is likely to raise the hackles of traditional historians. Unlike a peer-reviewed paper, citation in docupoetry can be inconsistent, perhaps because citations themselves aren’t always aesthetically pleasing or convenient. Yang’s book spirals through dozens of references in a single sequence, spanning from classical epics to Yoruba spiritual concepts to the poet’s own childhood in Escondido, California. Unless you’re an expert in Texas history, Great Plains botany, Southwestern colonialism, contemporary art, Spanish-language literature, and indigenous politics around the world, many of these references probably make pleasing sounds as they whiz right over your head. Here, again, the dead raise their hands: what happens when the names of one person’s ancestors become senseless sound in another person’s ear?

Marfa, a town of about 1,800 people on the northeastern fringe of the Chihuahuan Desert, is an ambitious and difficult subject for a docupoet. Mostly regarded as a quirky artists’ retreat, Marfa’s reputation has been so whitewashed it casts its own mirage. Since at least 1875, when Jesus Rodriquez registered the county’s first cattle brand, Marfa’s most consistent population has been Tejano and Chicano ranch families. Hollywood westerns didn’t start using the local landscape as a backdrop until 1950, around the time that real cowboys lost their jobs and livestock to a series of devastating droughts. The artists began trickling in after 1971, when Donald Judd, often called a minimalist sculptor despite rejecting both of those labels, came to town seeking peace, quiet, and cheap real estate. Many others—including Yang’s muse, the British plein-air painter Rackstraw Downes–followed. Take away the fancy hotels and world-class art museums, though, and Marfa is just another small Texas town that revolves around Friday night lights, smoked meats, and vintage trucks.

Yang began working on these poems during his Marfa-based Lannan fellowship in 2011, around the time local tourism shifted its focus from movie buffs and Judd pilgrims to music festivals. For all its cultural highlights, the town is still isolated (according to Google Maps, my address doesn’t exist). The nearest sizable airport is three and a half hours away, and if you happen to come on the wrong day, every restaurant for 30 miles might be closed. When the festivals arrive, a tidal wave of big-city amenities follows: late-night food trucks, waxing salons, yoga retreats. As the border becomes increasingly militarized, outsiders’ perceptions of Marfa as a carefree vacation destination take on a sinister cast. On one edge of town, Instagram influencers sleep in tipis across the street from a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) station that’s stood sentinel for nearly a hundred years. Twenty miles in the other direction, a CBP Aerostat, an enormous blimp hung with radar and surveillance technology, hovers over the road-trippers and celebrities heading out to Prada Marfa, an art installation built to look like a luxury store that’s slowly crumbling into the desert. From one moment to the next, this part of Texas can feel like the loneliest place you’ve ever been or the most intensely surveilled.

This isn’t to say travelers are killing the town. Presidio County, of which Marfa is the county seat, is the one of the poorest county in the United States. Without tourist dollars and art foundations, Marfa would likely be just a courthouse and a Dairy Queen. Its very existence is an accident of technology and colonial occupation: for the past 500 years, Marfa has been a place people pass through, smack in the no-man’s-land between several overland routes used by treasure seekers, native and settler alike. La Junta de los Rios—where the Rio Grande and the Rio Concho meet between Ojinaga, Chihuahua, and Presidio, Texas—has supported agricultural settlements for thousands of years, but Marfa, roughly 60 miles northeast, is part of the region the Spanish called despoblado, or uninhabited place. They didn’t even come along to name it until the 16th century. Later, the Comanche and Apache tamed Spanish horses and descended from mountains farther west. Wagon trains rumbled through and left, then the army, then Hollywood. In order to survive such a place, each wave of newcomers appropriated the ways of those who came before: the Comanche and Apache fought each other with Spanish weapons on horses while the Texas Rangers used their indigenous guerilla tactics to protect the livestock of local ranchers. Donald Judd loved the adobe architecture and big spurs and hats of the Old Southwest; today’s festival crowd loves them, too. Out here, the sky is so big you can project onto it whatever you want.

For all my talk of insiders and outsiders, I’m somewhere in the middle: comparatively new in town, but no stranger to the rural West. I came to Marfa mostly to live closer to Big Bend National Park, and also because the bookstore is really, really good. Some people are Texans by birth, but I think of myself as Texan by archive. The archives are where we keep our darkest secrets and most desperately held myths, and in Texas, a state that’s both proud of its history and defiantly ahistorical, the gulf between what we think we know and what actually happened is deep. To read Yang’s text on its own terms, I wanted to trace his sources in local libraries, museums, and graveyards. With a Marfa Public Library card, you can access the town’s “unofficial” archive, indexed in a single card catalogue drawer kept on a shelf under the front desk. Its contents can be requested by typewritten keyword: Water Witching. Moon Ranch. Buried Treasure. The archive was started by the Marfa High Junior Historians in the ’70s, and much of it consists of school papers that teenagers wrote. I leafed through reports titled “Television Arrives in Marfa” and “Family Flees Hungry Wolves in Mad Auto Drive,” the copies still underscored with the teacher’s red ink. I wondered if these teenagers knew that their term papers would someday be scoured by outsiders looking for the truth about their town.

Yang’s text flickers in and out of Marfa like a spotty radio signal. A poem in the voice of Judd’s housekeeper is docupoetry at its best. It transcribes and lineates a fragment of an interview in a process not unlike sculpture:

He brought me over here

and I had never seen art, okay …
and I said, “What is this?!”

And he said, “That’s art.”

And I said, “Oh...! Okay, well...”
That’s when I started knowing
what art was. I had never seen it.

By turning Lorina Naegele’s recollections into a poem, stutters and all, Yang swings the spotlight away from Judd and toward his domestic staff. In Marfa, where the arts institutions skew male, this is an important gesture that acknowledges the contributions that women—working-class women of color, in particular—have made to the town’s art scene. When Judd first came to town, some locals thought he’d come to start a cult. If you can’t picture Naegele, still a little wary of her new boss, hovering over the stove in one corner of a World War I-era airplane hangar painstakingly arranged with millions of dollars of monumental artwork, does this poem convey the same intimacy and strangeness?

Elsewhere in Hey, Marfa, there’s ambiguity about what the poems intentionally leave out and what just doesn’t factor into their conception of Marfa. This ambiguity is most concentrated in the book’s first few poems, which depict Yang’s journey to Marfa from the El Paso airport. The first poem recounts being picked up “beneath an enormous bronze stallion,” but this particular statue isn’t just any enormous bronze stallion—it is purported to be the most enormous bronze equestrian statue and a flashpoint for controversy since its construction in 2006. Its figure model is the conquistador Juan de Oñate, a notoriously brutal colonial governor who sacked Acoma Pueblo, approximately 500 miles northwest, after its residents resisted Spanish rule. As the ruins of the pueblo smoldered, Oñate ordered his men to cut off one foot from every Acoma man over the age of 25, literally hobbling an entire generation of indigenous resistance fighters. Local debate over the statue mirrors discussion elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon over Confederate monuments, but the poem looks past that, telling readers only that the horse is “missing its priapus.” Regular visitors to the El Paso airport can investigate for themselves: the rearing stallion bears the largest pair of bronze horse testicles in the world.

The next poem is a meditation on Juárez, El Paso’s sister city, across the “bridge / between the promise / of heaven and hell.” The poem puts the word feminicido— femicide—on its own line, a textual roadside memorial to the cartel violence that has plagued Juárez for decades and has claimed the lives of an estimated 300 to 400 women. While this poem relays sympathy for the grittier realities of life in the borderlands, I am uncomfortable with the simplicity of the “heaven and hell” dichotomy trotted out in many border travelogues. While it’s statistically true that Juárez suffers more murders per capita than El Paso, if Juárez is “hell,” then what is Tornillo, 40 miles southeast on the American side, where migrant children wrenched from their families were corralled in tent cities that regularly reach 105 degrees? Much of the current panic about the border concerns people crossing to the United States from Mexico, but the search for a better life goes in both directions. Low-income folks on the US side of the border often cross into Mexico for abortions, government-subsidized dental care, cheaper car repair, pollo al carbon, and prescription medication.

To get from El Paso to Marfa, you must pass through the Sierra Blanca checkpoint, one of the tenuously constitutional inspection stations 100 highway miles from the border. There, each driver submits to questioning and a dog search of their vehicle: Are you a US citizen? Did you cross the border? What were you doing in El Paso? This border checkpoint, in a town so small it doesn’t even have a supermarket, has seen the likes of Willie Nelson, Fiona Apple, and Snoop Dogg hauled into the jailhouse for narcotics possession. For the casual Marfa road tripper, the Sierra Blanca checkpoint is the first taste of life in a border community, where tasks as simple as leaving town to buy groceries or dropping someone off at the airport require a federal interrogation. Yang encounters Border Patrol later in the book, but he is apparently exempt from the routine search. He cruises through what he describes as “tame wilderness”—though this wilderness is sutured by barbed wire fences. The Chihuahuan Desert is wetter than any other American desert and its mountains are relatively stubby, but its summers are hot, its winters are harsh, and its plants are covered in spines. Many of the region’s mountains are sky islands—the climate of the peaks and the lowlands are radically different and teem with isolated species found nowhere else in the world. This part of Far West Texas, where tarantulas tangle with bears and rattlesnakes, is one of the harshest and wildest places in America, dotted with ruins left by conquistadors and ranchers and coal miners and hoteliers bested by its extremes. It’s also pocked with the lonely graves of people who died crossing the border, victims of what CBP smugly refers to as the “funnel effect:” highway checkpoints like the one at Sierra Blanca push migrants who want to avoid detection deeper into treacherous terrain, where they perish from falls, snakebites, and dehydration.

When Yang’s poems finally anchor themselves in Marfa proper, they offer sharp insights into the town’s early history and showcase the poet’s strengths as a researcher and translator. In “Ruperta Gongora,” the poet profiles a curandera (traditional healer) who “watched [Pancho] Villa’s occupation of Juárez / from El Paso, heard the music mingling with gunfire.” Before combing the Marfa Junior Historians’ archive, I wasn’t aware that the town’s Border Patrol presence is almost a century old, and traces its roots to the Battle of Columbus, a raid by Pancho Villa on a small border town in New Mexico. When the Villistas had a heavy presence in Ojinaga in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution, refugees from all walks of Chihuahuan life made their way to Marfa. On the next page, Yang leaps back a generation with a quote from Robert Reed Ellison, a cowboy who remembered Marfa as a railroad water stop not long after its founding in 1883: “Joe Buhl, a Frenchman, had a saloon in one tent, and off a little ways a Chinaman had a restaurant. No one was there except a Railroad agent and operator and two section crews, all Chinamen.” Yang’s emphasis on the Chinese laborers of the West is an important reclamation of a history too often omitted from textbooks and Wikipedia entries. Before reading this book, I knew immigrants came to the Trans-Pecos region of Texas to work the railroad, but I had never considered that my town might have been majority Chinese at one point. That’s the magic of docupoetry: all of these texts and records are available to those who look, and their transformation into poems provides the same information with a healthy dose of emotional understanding and human context.

In most accounts of Marfa’s history, Ellison is remembered as the cowboy who first reported seeing the Marfa Lights. Anyone who has heard of Marfa has likely heard of the lights, unexplained orbs that dance around the Chinati Mountains at night. Ellison reported seeing the lights in 1883, way before the truck lights and cell phone towers that are often blamed for the lights today. Yang’s poems aren’t impressed: “Same sight as everywhere else,” he writes. “[B]ut there [at the viewing site] / you can relieve yourself inside.” Though the lights appear in most travel writing about Marfa, they’re the source of considerable local lore; to disbelieve in them marks one as an outsider. (In Yang’s defense, Judd also thought the lights were hooey.) Their longstanding mystery holds an important truth about existence in this corner of the Chihuahuan Desert: you can live here your whole life and still see things you can’t explain. Yang writes about locals as though they, too, might be myth: “Town’s asleep today ... people / gone inside ...to nowhere,” he recounts in one poem. In another, “the public assembles / somewhere out of sight ... passional attractions / impossible to partake of.” In a small town as dependent on tourism as Marfa, hiding from visitors is a vital skill. Pop-up bars, book clubs, food trucks, and other gathering places shift form from week to week, providing places for locals to hide from questions about why there’s nearly nothing open on Monday or what’s the big deal with this Judd guy, anyway. Friends passing through have often told me that the town feels “closed,” but it’s only closed until you rent a PO Box. In that sense, Marfa is like any other small community, but because of its remoteness, the rich social world created by residents feels that much more nourishing and surprising. In what other tiny Texas town can you talk about Yeats while in line for bánh mì?

Readers’ experiences with Hey, Marfa will vary depending on their notions of who ought to write about a place. Does that prerogative rest only with lifelong locals, who know its quirks intimately but may have spent their lives drinking the Kool-Aid of myth? Or is it better to be “first-time resident / for a month to stay,” with gaps in your knowledge but a more objective eye? Marfa is a particularly difficult place to pin down, partially because its history, in the Western sense, is mercurial. There’s only about 130 years of Anglo-American records, and much of the rest is oral history, passed on by people who either didn’t have written language or spoke only Spanish. Many aspects of the town’s identity, from the mystery lights in the mountains to rumors of the phantom La Llorona at the Marfa Dump, can’t be documented in any objective, scientific way. Most devastating to the town’s self-expression are its ever-widening class divides: wealthy out-of-towners buying vacation homes and Airbnbs have priced out many lifelong Marfans, and white transplants like myself juggle multiple service industry gigs to make rents with big-city price tags. Who’s got time to make art when you work three jobs and none of them offer health insurance? Visitors like Yang are often the only people with the financial resources best suited to make large-scale works about the town and its environs. That’s not to say Yang’s work doesn’t contribute a rigorous and considered vision of a place—it’s just different than the Marfa that I know, punctuated by menudo fundraisers, pitchers of ranch water, and watching the sunset from the back of my truck. Marfa is a small town with big hype, but its truth is out there somewhere, flickering like the lights at the base of the mountains.