Las Vegas Review of Books

Kyle Paoletta, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest (Pantheon), 352 pp. Hardback, $30.00.

Of the writers who have called the Southwestern United States home—Cormac McCarthy, Gloria Anzaldúa, Edward Abbey—almost every one of them has thought deeply about the region’s stark landscapes and the mythologies that shape its identity, often grappling with themes of survival, borders (both literal and figurative), and the human relationship to an unforgiving yet mesmerizing environment.

In American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, Kyle Paoletta, a writer from Alburquerque, aims to challenge the traditional narrative of the region as a place defined by desolation and struggle. He instead turns his focus to the cities that are not just anomalies in the desert but essential to understanding the Southwest’s future: Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso, and Las Vegas.

“Why is it vital that we understand and learn from the mistakes and triumphs of the people of the Southwest?” Paoletta uses this question to drive his research and findings, focusing on the people who have made these places habitable—and, soon, uninhabitable. In Phoenix, he visits the archives of Arizona Highways, a legacy magazine that contains travelogues and photographs related to Arizona, hoping to find out why Phoenix got so big so fast. In Albuquerque, Paoletta reflects upon a 1971 Chicano uprising that isn’t widely discussed in New Mexico. His suggestion that the Southwest region already represents what the rest of America will become relies heavily on the idea that issues like rapid urbanization, climate change, and ongoing activism will inevitably reshape the entire country in the same way they have shaped the Southwest.

Paoletta visits the outskirts of Phoenix, where a master-planned community, marketed as an oasis of affordability and modern comfort, rises from the surrounding desert. Yet the vision behind such developments was always selective, designed to attract a specific demographic: wealthy white retirees. This exclusivity, he argues, is precisely what allowed Phoenix to surpass the older settlements of the Southwest. As he speaks with residents, many drawn by the promise of opportunity, he finds them instead contending with water restrictions and an uncertain future. Their experiences highlight a central tension in his book: the region’s growth has been fueled by deliberate exclusion, yet its sustainability remains in question.

Among the regions on that same list is Las Vegas. And Paoletta dedicates an entire chapter to it, along with Henderson and other locations in Nevada. He opens the chapter with the Kim Sisters, a trio known for being the first Korean music group to achieve success in the U.S. market during the 1960s, and he uses their rise to fame as a key example in the city’s history of reinvention and its deep ties to economic volatility.

Paoletta writes, “The image of Vegas that animates the imagination of millions of tourists from around the world is just that: an image. The city underneath it, however, is southwestern to the core.”

In this chapter, titled “Defiance,” local Vegas residents will recognize familiar names like Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and the Kim Sisters, alongside a detailed account of the city’s long history of labor organizing. Through these stories, Paoletta arrives at his central argument: that Las Vegas, “through force of will alone,” has shaped the desert to accommodate any desire, defying the natural constraints that might otherwise limit its existence.

Is that defiance? Or is it a reflection of human resilience and ingenuity in the face of overwhelming challenges? Paoletta leaves that question unanswered, suggesting that what we might label as defiance could also be seen as a desperate yet bold effort to push against the very forces that make life in the desert so tenuous. In the end, Las Vegas becomes a symbol not just of excess and reinvention but of the deep tensions between human ambition and environmental limitations, forcing readers to consider the cost of such defiance and what it means for the future of other cities that might follow in its footsteps.

Paoletta argues that the Southwest serves as both a preview of America’s future and a model for how cities might adapt to climate and resource challenges.

Paoletta argues that the Southwest serves as both a preview of America’s future and a model for how cities might adapt to climate and resource challenges. He suggests that the issues currently defining the region will soon shape cities across the country. However, while this argument is compelling, it at times leans too heavily on broad generalizations, overlooking the unique political and economic factors that distinguish the Southwest from other parts of the United States. His exploration of local policymakers and residents who have adapted to these harsh conditions offers valuable insight into the innovation required to sustain life in an increasingly challenging environment, but it’s never enough to claim that the rest of America will inevitably follow the same trajectory. Regional differences in governance and infrastructure mean that what works in the Southwest may not be directly applicable elsewhere.

Paoletta’s argument does spark important discussions about climate resilience and urban adaptation, but his tendency to universalize the Southwest’s experience risks oversimplifying the complexities of environmental and demographic shifts across the rest of the country. Still, American Oasis serves as a crucial case study, urging readers to reckon with the pressing challenges of sustainability and resource management.

Paoletta’s work has always concerned itself with the current and looming issues of the Southwest—from his writing about art installations that often frame the desert as desolate for High Country News, to his search for “a literature” in the Southwest for The Believer, to his reflections on political and economic challenges in Arizona for The Baffler. And in his debut book, he expands on these interests, weaving together reportage, history, and, in a different vein, personal narrative—an introspective thread that sets itself apart from the outward-looking analysis of the region—to argue that the Southwest is not just a harbinger of crisis.

Drawing from ecological determinism and urban futurism, Paoletta positions the Southwest as a site where human adaptation is both constrained and catalyzed by the environment, echoing theories from works like Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis and My Los Angeles by Edward Soja. His argument aligns with Davis’s notion of the “ecology of fear,” wherein urban expansion in fragile landscapes inevitably encounters the limits of sustainability, yet it also gestures toward Soja’s spatial theory, suggesting that cities are dynamic, socially produced spaces capable of continual reinvention. By framing the Southwest as a microcosm of broader global shifts, Paoletta implicitly engages with ideas of spatial justice, questioning who gets to thrive in these rapidly transforming landscapes and at what cost.

This is why Paoletta’s exploration of the Southwest is ultimately about power—those who wield it, those who are excluded from it, and how it shapes the region’s future. By interrogating these intersections of issues that seem to plague the American Southwest, Paoletta explains how the fight for sustainability in the region is also a fight over governance and over the right to belong in an increasingly precarious landscape.