The National Park To Come - (Introduction Inside National Parks)

INTRODUCTION
Inside National Parks
At the easternmost end of Big Bend National Park is Boquillas

Canyon, remote and majestic, its limestone walls cradling the lazy
Rio Grande. In the winter months, the river is between ten and
twenty feet across and no more than a few feet deep. The hiking
trail begins on the north bank, at the mouth, where a man erupts
into a recognizable bolero each time hikers pass him, his booming
voice amplified by the canyon walls. Several stones lie on the
Copyright © 2015. Stanford University Press. All rights reserved.
ground a few feet away, identifying him as “Singing Mexican Vic-

tor.” The Rio Grande is also the U.S.–Mexico border and Victor
Valdez’s presence on the north bank is against U.S. law. He is one
of the people described by the signage particular to the eastern end
of the park, warning visitors that “purchase or possession of items
obtained from Mexican Nationals is illegal. Illegally purchased
items will be seized and violators may be prosecuted.” One needn’t
see his passport to know that Valdez is not there to hike. Other
Mexican nationals are there also, crossing the river on horseback
or by boat countless times a day to collect “donations” that visitors
are asked to leave in exchange for little metal scorpions, friendship
bracelets, and walking sticks made on the Mexican side. The riders
approach visitors, offering the privilege of photographing the
horses and photographing oneself on the back of a horse.
Grebowicz, Margret. The National Park to Come, Stanford University Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook
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2 T H E N A T I O N A L PA R K T O C O M E
Since these people pose no real threat, the relationship between

them and the U.S. Border Patrol amounts to a daily, almost ritual-
ized combination of avoidance, verbal reprimands, temporary
compliance, predictable noncompliance, tolerance, and friendly
exchange. This industry, if something on this small a scale may be
called that, has been going on since early 2002, when the U.S.
government ordered the closure of all unstaffed border crossings
into Mexico and Canada. One of the crossings affected was that at
Boquillas, which had traditionally served three purposes. For one,
it had allowed park visitors to cross by boat and visit the rural vil-
lage of Boquillas del Carmen in order to enjoy a taco and a beer
and purchase some of these same souvenirs legally. Boquillas is the
only crossing into Mexico from the grounds of a national park.
The only other crossing within the forty-eight states is in Glacier,
which borders Canada, where the border itself, high in the snow-
covered Rockies, is significantly more difficult to cross illegally
than this one. Since its closure, Boquillas residents have resorted to
crossing the river many times a day in hopes of making a few dol-
lars in the form of visitor donations. Valdez’s former job was bring-
ing park visitors across the river, in the same boat that later served
to get him to the north bank so that he could sing for money.
Secondly, and more importantly, like the other tiny villages
along the border, Boquillas was sustained largely thanks to access to
goods and services on the American side. Residents shopped at the
campground grocery store at Rio Grande Village, the tourist center
built in the late 1960s at a site which had been of human interest
for centuries and was chosen by the National Park Service partly
for its historical value.1 In the decades following, many Boquillas
children attended school in nearby Study Butte–Terlingua. The
closest Mexican town is Múzquiz, 250 km away, so going to town
meant crossing the river to the American side. And thirdly, the
crossing had been central to environmental restoration work on
the Rio Grande and the surrounding desert and mountain ecosys-
tems comprised in the land both north and south of the border. In
I N T R O D U C T I O N : I N S I D E N A T I O N A L PA R K S 3
2006, four years after the border closure, protected wilderness

areas on the Mexican side entered into Sister Park Partnership
with the U.S. parks Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, and White
Sands. From 2006 to 2013, collaborative restoration work on the
river the countries share had to be conducted by means of “many
hours of driving through Presidio-Ojinaga and Del Rio-Ciudad
Acuña international crossings to work with counterparts.”2
April 10, 2013, was the day of the long-awaited reopening of
Boquillas Crossing Port of Entry, which had been announced and
postponed multiple times over the two years prior. In this era of
homeland security, the port of entry is “virtually staffed,” with a
passport scanner and a camera that transmits the image to a
staffed border crossing in El Paso, over 300 miles away. Prior to
the closure the population of Boquillas was over twice what it is
now. Many residents moved to the United States, where they
worked without proper documents for years, and only some
returned to their families and homes in Boquillas prior to the
reopening. Valdez’s is among the twenty-five or so households left
in the village, where literacy is low and passport applications dif-
ficult to come by, much less to fill out. Without passports, the
Boquillas residents may not enter the United States. Once a two-
way street, the crossing has reopened as a one-way street for the
first time in the history of this region.
The benefits of the reopening have been enormous from the
perspective of binational conservation efforts, and collaborative
wilderness restoration work is now much easier, in particular on
the shared space that is the river. The National Park Service also
benefits from advertising the cultural experience of visiting a real,
honest-to-goodness Mexican village. The reopening is framed in
terms of cultural preservation: since this region has historically
always been binational, enjoying free mobility across the river, the
reopening gives visitors the real experience that was not available
while the border was closed. Not too far removed from the deci-
sion in 1930 to allow a handful of Ahwahnechee to remain on the
grounds of Yosemite Park while others were forcibly removed, the

value of the crossing is formulated in terms of visitors enjoying an
authentic experience of the area and its cultural history. What the
park’s interpretive materials leave out is that the unidirectional
movement of traffic is a complete departure from the free move-
ment of the past and is in fact creating conditions in Boquillas
that are historically unique. The new crossing serves “American
tourists seeking to experience a day trip” almost exclusively, while
the Mexican nationals continue their northbound movements
illegally.3 Valdez now sings on the Mexican side of the crossing for
park visitors arriving by boat, while another man, who also identi-
fies as “Singing Mexican Victor,” occasionally sings in the canyon
on the American side, a sign that “Singing Mexican Victor” has
become an institution. The flyer distributed in Study Butte–
Terlingua alerting people to the reopening is clearly aimed at visi-
tors more than residents. “Did you bring your passport? You
should go to Boquillas!” it reads, and features a bulleted list of the
new crossing rules under the heading, “Things to keep in mind”:
a valid passport, a visa acquired on the Mexican side, customs
regulations, and the crossing’s hours of operation. Among these
points is the directive not to bring humanitarian aid items such as

food and clothing to give to the villagers, and then another direc-
tive, more than slightly confusing in this context, in which First
World ecotourism meets Third World desperation: “Have fun!”
Inside Panther Junction Visitor Center there is a panel that
reads, “Who is the most dangerous animal in the desert?” It opens
to reveal a mirror. What exactly is the sense of “the national” that
the parks construct, and what modes of civic life are produced by
this process? As they demarcate regions specifically designed to
read as politically innocent, America’s national parks create partic-
ular social margins, in relation to particular social centers. It is this
dynamic that I hope to outline in some detail. Who is the visitor in
these spaces? Who is the national and who the foreigner? To whose
children is the ostensibly unpeopled wilderness of the future owed,
and at what cost (to whom)? In short, how is the contemporary

idea of nation, in continuous tension with migration and indige-
nousness, reproduced in what counts as nature today?4 These are
not empirical questions, but ones of political imagination.
HOME
The National Park Service (henceforth NPS) website is decorated

with the trademarked motto, “Experience your America.” Paradoxi-
cally, it is with the creation of the national park idea and the con-
struction of wilderness as unpeopled space that this particular way of
thinking about nature, as “yours,” emerges. The National Parks:
America’s Best Idea, a six-part documentary by Ken Burns that aired
on PBS in 2009, begins by emphasizing the collective “you,” a dem-
ocratically organized body with equal rights to and equal investment
in these spaces. “The national parks embody a radical idea, as
uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence, born in the
United States nearly a century after its creation. It is a truly demo-
cratic idea, that the magnificent natural wonders of the land should
be available not to a privileged few, but to everyone.”5 This means
not only that the parks are open to the public, with low entrance
fees, but also that the public is directly involved in decision making.
The NPS website has a “Planning, Environment, and Public Com-
ment” link, with an extensive list of all currently active projects in
the park system, from raising campground fees and fixing damage to
park roads to comprehensive environmental management plans.
Along with a relatively detailed project summary, each project page
lists contact information for the park superintendent or project
leader, links to PDFs of related documents, schedules of meetings
about the proposed changes, and a page where users may enter com-
ments directly during a limited open comment period. Accordingly,
the Burns National Parks enterprise, which includes the six-episode
documentary by Burns and Duncan and a coffee-table book by
Duncan, also includes an elaborate PBS website with a “Share Your
Story” feature, onto which users may upload text, photo, and video
content to tell their own national park adventures to others.
Throughout the Burns series, the collective sense of “you”
remains in tension with the first-person singular sense of “you.” A
video clip with a voice-over by Burns’s writer and coproducer,
Dayton Duncan, quickly turns the focus to the individual “you,”
at the same time adding the element of “owner” of the park: “You,
you, are the owner of some of the best seafront property this
nation’s got. You own magnificent waterfalls. You own stunning
views of mountains and stunning views of gorgeous canyons.
They belong to you, they’re yours. And all that’s asked of you is to
put it in your will for your children so they can have it too.”6 This
intergenerational futurity is already written into the Organic Act
of 1916, which establishes the purpose of the parks as being “to
conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the
wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in
such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for
the enjoyment of future generations.”7
However, as philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch
writes, the actual purpose of the parks, “even today, is far from
clear. . . . The periodic disputes over the national parks only under-
score the contradictions implicit in their institution from their
inception, contradictions that could not help but leave their mark
on the very sites that the new agency had been charged with pre-
serving.”8 Boquillas Crossing is precisely such a site of contradic-
tion. Who is at home in this homeland, this space that is the river,
at once wilderness and border? As people flock to national parks
ostensibly seeking to leave home and to make contact with the
Great Outdoors, they encounter spaces that are rigorously domes-
ticated, landscaped, and tamed, not necessarily by design (although
there is that too) but by deliberate discursive construction. The
continuity between domesticity and wilderness that is the national
park should come as no surprise if cultural theorist Dominic
Pettman is correct in calling the parks “cartographic states of
exception.” According to the vision of Frederick Law Olmsted,

urban reformer, architect of New York’s Central Park, and advocate
for the Yosemite wilderness and the park idea in general, these
spaces were to be set aside for the contemplation of natural beauty
by common citizens, especially the working class. In order for this
to happen, however, Pettman writes, “this experience must be with-
out any violent disjunction from the daily movements and rituals
of urban or suburban life.”9 It is precisely because it is “yours” that
the space of the national park cannot be so inaccessible or unintel-
ligible as to seem threatening, foreign, or otherwise traumatic.
While city parks offer this continuity with home by virtue of
their visibly unnatural designs, the vast spaces that national parks
offer are tamed otherwise—ideologically and through the lens of
the postcard industry and landscape photographers. For this rea-
son, photography was central to the legal argument for the creation
of the national park system. Photographs by Eadweard Muybridge,
Carleton E. Watkins, and Charles Leander Weed offered support
for the Olmsted Plan, which stated that the public had a right to
Yosemite because natural scenery invites contemplation, that most
universal of human activities which has beneficial effects on the
society as a whole. At stake in 1865 was the universal, contempla-

tive subject; thoughtfulness and civilized sentiments were no lon-
ger qualities exclusive of the elite.10 The supporting photographs
offered “a reality . . . that is essentially ‘scenic.’”11 By the time of
the drafting of the Organic Act of 1916, which created the park
system, a magazine called National Geographic ran the “profusely
illustrated” article “The Land of the Best” by the magazine’s editor,
Gilbert H. Grosvenor. The article emphasized the scenery of the
parks and the National Geographic Society put an issue in the
hands of every Congress member before the act came up for vote.12
Today, the Yosemite website has a separate page dedicated to Ansel
Adams, which announces that when the photographer (and by
extension, every photographer since Adams) looked at the park,
“he saw art.”13
But the turn to the scenic predates the invention of photogra-

phy by more than a century. The idea of private ownership of
nature comes into existence at the same time as the idea of nature
as scene, dating back to the rise of the bourgeoisie in the eigh-
teenth century and the construction of private spaces for viewing
nature appropriately. As explorers explored wild areas, they also
created spaces where nature could be best appreciated and experi-
enced by designating them with markers, describing them in
guidebooks, and delineating them physically in increasingly rigor-
ous mapmaking. The idea of rational land management extended
to building equivalent natural spaces at home, often including
aviaries and menageries of small, exotic animals, to serve as spaces
for socializing. Thus, the idea of the natural park begins with eigh-
teenth-century discourses around gardening, tourism, and rational
and deliberate designing of environments for social interaction.
National parks, however, mark a departure from the bourgeois
idea of nature as a landscaped playground for nobles, by introduc-
ing the idea of democratic ownership. Modeled on the slightly
different nineteenth-century concept of the city park, which
belongs to every city dweller in principle, the national park pres-
ents the scene of nature for everyone to enjoy. In his writings,

Olmsted specifically distinguishes the New World from the Old,
where the aristocracy presumed that the working classes lacked
the refinement necessary to appreciate either art or nature. “The
free use of the land” by “the whole body of the people forever” is
thus a political duty, part of the destiny of the New World and its
break from Europe.14 Advances in technology in the 1850s made it
possible for photographers to participate in Yosemite expeditions
and present the public with a nature-scene, whose aesthetic value
was beyond question.
The twentieth century saw the democratization not only of
nature as scene, but also of photography, so that democratic own-
ership meant that each visitor’s own, insignificant little camera
mediated the experience of park space. Today, the right to con-
template the scenic means, famously, a handful of cars pulled over

on the side of the road in Yellowstone wherever there is a moose,
elk, or bison in “shooting” range. We almost never hike without
our cameras, hoping for our own “Ansel Adams” moments.15 Sig-
nage inside parks often shows what is unmistakably a camera icon,
indicating an upcoming photo opportunity, which thereby
becomes a photo necessity. At the same time, since this imaginary
is one of wilderness, we tend to take our park photos in such a
way as to exclude the other cars, and indeed any signs of the other
people. We make sure our photos of views, many of which we take
at designated viewpoints constructed specifically for that purpose,
exclude the very roads which brought us there. People, mainte-
nance buildings, toilets, water fountains, trails, handrails, and
anything else that recalls the infrastructure which makes our visit
leisurely and, in some places, possible at all, is what we take great
pains to exclude from the photographic frame.16 The imaginary
that is the national park depends on the maintenance of the dem-
ocratic ideal in the photographic act, an activity related to both
ownership and contemplation, and in the photographs them-
selves, which convey the paradoxical notion of a nature-for-the-
people, at once “It’s mine” and “ It’s really, truly nature, with no
(other) people in it.” The impossible simultaneity of these senti-
ments is necessary for the Great Outdoors to become both domes-
ticated and democratic, “our” home from which we untiringly
send postcards (to whom?) as if to say “wish you were here.”
But who, exactly, gets to be here, under what conditions, and
with what caption? In Big Bend the relationships between ideas of
nation, foreignness, and home are uniquely complicated, dynamic,
and on display. Assumptions about belonging, security, and safety,
expectations of surveillance and reporting, and even ecological con-
cepts like native and invasive species are all inflected with the ten-
sions particular to keeping undocumented Mexican migrants out.
Prior to the reopening, the newsletter given to every visitor upon
entry included a section about the border, showing a photograph of
the very trinkets one was instructed not to purchase for multiple
reasons: because the Mexican merchants will be arrested and, per-
haps most importantly, because “supporting this illegal activity con-
tributes to the continued damage along the Rio Grande, and
jeopardizes the possibility of reopening the crossing in the future.”
A separate section titled “Border Safety” instructed visitors to “avoid
travel on well-used but unofficial ‘trails,’ “report any suspicious
behavior to park staff or Border Patrol,” and not pick up hitch
hikers.17 Those same safety regulations are in the new newsletter.
And yet ironically nothing happens on the surface. The ten-
sions are present in precisely what one does not see. The border
patrol checkpoints on both highways leading away from the park
are in no way related to Victor Valdez and the Mexicans on horse-
back selling souvenirs, nor does the presence of this handful of
people require increasing the number of border patrol officers in
the park to eight, in accord with the general plans to increase
border security along the entire length of the border. But some-
thing out there, somewhere, that abstract presence implied by the
words “drug war,” requires these precautions and this infrastruc-
ture. In spite of a smattering of signs warning of thefts from unat-
tended vehicles, visitors are well aware that “Singing Mexican

Victor” is not a threat to border security, precisely because border
patrol has bigger fish to fry. These bigger fish are not actually in
the park itself, which boasts being the safest section of the bor-
der.18 The dangerous conflicts are taking place elsewhere, but
their spectral presence informs the Big Bend landscape, both dis-
cursively and in terms of actual policies, which in turn affect the
space in material ways.
Boquillas Crossing itself posed no danger for many decades,
but the closure and the delay surrounding the reopening intro-
duced a new climate, in which wilderness, apolitical by definition,
and the ethics of restoration have become discursively and materi-
ally intertwined with the politics of homeland security. “Home-
land” here refers to a threatened space that requires surveillance
and protection, which becomes operative in what it means to

maintain the park for future generations. Cooperation between
the park service and border patrol, and the expectation that visi-
tors will cooperate with both if it comes to that, shape a specific
sense of the “everyone” to whom the natural space is imagined to
collectively belong.
VISITOR
In Death Valley National Park, the word “homeland” is in even

more regular use. Here, the other national presence is the Timbi-
sha Shoshone Tribe that has lived on the grounds of the park for
centuries and claimed the right to continue doing so in the Home-
land Act of 2000, signed six years after Death Valley National
Monument gained national park status. The Timbisha Shoshone,
and only they, have the right to live on park grounds, through
which non-Timbisha U.S. citizens merely pass as “visitors.” The
Furnace Creek Visitor Center houses a new exhibit, fully reno-
vated in 2012, which underscores the distinction between who is at
home here and who is merely visiting. A large plaque titled “Pass-
ing Through,” which refers to the area as being more suitable for
visiting than for settling, hangs puzzlingly next to one of equally
impressive size, titled “Homeland,” which describes the area as
having been inhabited by the Timbisha Shoshone for thousands
of years.
Death Valley is the only case in which the U.S. government has
returned park land to its indigenous inhabitants. This is signifi-
cant, since the parks from which Native Americans were displaced
in the largest numbers were some of the earliest parks created—
Yellowstone (1872), Yosemite (1890), and Glacier (1910)—while
Death Valley is one of the nation’s youngest (1994). Much of the
opposition to the Homeland Act was on the grounds that it would
set a precedent according to which other tribes would demand the
return of federally managed land.19 The newly redone welcome
sign identifies the park as “home of the Timbisha Shoshone,” and

the visitor’s guide that one receives upon entry lists the tribe as
one of the park’s partners in wilderness restoration. In contrast to
Big Bend, where “home” refers to America and not Mexico, in
Death Valley “home” refers to Timbisha Shoshone land and not
the United States. While the majority of visitors to Big Bend are
Americans, due perhaps to its remote location (the closest interna-
tional airport is a five-hour drive away), Death Valley’s proximity
to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon causes it to receive compara-
tively far more foreigners, especially Europeans. The exhibit at
Furnace Creek includes a plaque titled “Identity: We Are Still
Here,” which is clearly meant to appeal to the experiences and
emotions of non-American visitors, describing the conflict
between the Timbisha and the NPS as “familiar to anyone who
has immigrated to another country—and to anyone whose coun-
try has been invaded and occupied.” It is not accidental that Theo-
dore Catton, author of the Homeland Act’s officially commissioned
administrative history, refers to the village at Furnace Creek as
“the Tribe’s Sarajevo.”20
The unique situation of tribe members living inside the park on
reservation land gives rise to Death Valley’s particularly splintered

historicity, which complicates the directive to preserve the land
“for our children.” The different time scales on which park land
may be imagined complicate the intertemporal ethics at work in
the park idea. In Big Bend, for instance, the Panther Junction
Visitor Center presents the landscape in terms of its prehistory,
including extensive materials about dinosaurs that once lived
there and focusing on geological information on an impressively
large timescale. In contrast, Furnace Creek Visitor Center presents
much of Death Valley’s history on the scale of its human inhabit-
ants, including settlers, miners, and early vacationers, in addition
to the prehistorical imaginary. But the Timbisha Shoshone’s pres-
ence frustrates the human historical trajectory. In “Seeing Death
Valley,” the film that is shown in several park locations, tribal elder
Pauline Esteves describes her people as having “always” lived

there—a sense of “always” which is clearly incommensurable with
a white-historical time line.21 And while busloads of tourists flock
to the fully accessible Salt Creek exhibit in hopes of seeing the
endangered, indigenous Salt Creek Pupfish in its natural habitat,
the village, visible from the main road, with its smattering of
mobile homes, remains mysterious, uncanny, and at a distance.
Unlike the Yosemite Indians, and in some ways unlike the resi-
dents of Boquillas since the border reopening, the Timbisha’s role,
at once ahistorical and contemporary, is not to enhance the visi-
tor’s experience. Despite a very “Indian”-looking sign of turquoise
and burnt orange, the village itself is not what Mark David Spence
calls “the display of past-tense Indians.”22
Privately, Esteves objects to the use of the term “tribe,” because
she knows it to be politically loaded. She’s not talking about a
tribe, she explains, but about the indigenous people who live on
the land.23 And it was precisely because the land was removed
from under their homes by the act of congress that turned Death
Valley into federally managed land that the Timbisha became
“non-ward Indians,” or Indians without official tribal status. Tribal
recognition was necessary to receive government aid to continue

living where they have always lived, and at the same time impossi-
ble, precisely because of where they lived. In 1983 the Timbisha
became recognized as a tribe without a land base, which only made
the quest for the land that much more urgent.24 Tribal govern-
ment moved to Bishop, California, leaving behind two small,
deserted administrative buildings and a defunct radio station in
the village. The trust land on which the Timbisha are allowed to
reside (including building privately owned homes with founda-
tions) houses seventeen households today. Most of the inhabitants
are elderly, because the young people have moved out of the park.
As is clear in the distinction made by Esteves, however, the whole
point was not to move. The community persisted thanks largely to
a few individuals’ refusal to move out of their dilapidated homes.
The Homeland Act, an enormously significant event from the

point of view of Native American law, deeply affecting the relation-
ship between the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land
Management, and of the government-to-government relationship,
was founded on the need of the tribe to continue living inside the
park, not in the neighboring trust lands directly outside it.
The park newsletter includes a tiny map, presented under the
heading “To Preserve a Way of Life,” which shows the large swath
of land designated as “Timbisha Shoshone Historical and Cultural
Preservation Area” to be most of the park itself. However, the vil-
lage’s economic depression and dwindling population are caused
in part by park-specific constraints on commercial development,
as well as on the seasonal nomadism the tribe has traditionally
practiced in order to survive the extreme climate changes. The
mountainous area called “Wildrose,” the tribe’s camp during the
sweltering summers, is no longer available for them as a place to
live. As with the rest of the park, however, the Wildrose area is
open for hiking and backcountry camping all year round, in keep-
ing with the Wilderness Act of 1964, which defines wilderness as
“an area where the earth and its community of life are untram-
meled by man, where man finds himself as a visitor who does not
remain.”25 Far from trumping all else inside the parks, however,
the Wilderness Act is in ongoing conflict with other acts of Con-
gress—the Patriot Act in Big Bend, the Homeland Act in Death
Valley, the Historic Preservation Act, and the Endangered Species
Act—in competition with each other to govern park spaces in the
terms specific to them.26 Often the terms of one act are in explicit
conflict with those of another, and these tensions are among the
main themes of this book.
Social inequalities, and the economic inequalities that both gener-

ate and result from them, exist inside national parks and not
merely incidentally. But the ecological and aesthetic concerns at
the heart of the park idea turn these into “cultural experiences” for
the visitor, rendering them unintelligible in political terms. Much

work has been devoted to showing that the depoliticization of wil-
derness has a history, but I am interested in the ways it remains
pervasive today. One major reason these dynamics are difficult to
see, much less resist, is the role of affect, or emotion, in the pro-
duction of civic identities marked by a relationship to wilderness.
I would like to begin to outline something we might call the wil-
derness affect, which includes, I argue, our participation in wil-
derness-as-spectacle as a form of social relation. I hope to show
that any examination of wilderness must today also be an exami-
nation of mass society, specifically of the emotions surrounding
collectivity. And finally, since environmental responsibility is pre-
sented in terms of obligations to future generations, my questions
will concern the affective investment in the future in ecological
discourse.
This, then, is a book about the foreigner and the future as they
shape nature-spaces held in reserve for an unprecedentedly future-
oriented “us.” The two parks I study here, Big Bend and Death
Valley, present these issues in particularly vivid ways. But beyond
these case studies, how we imagine the foreigner and the future has
already begun to impact the national park to come, shaping the

national park system in general as it struggles to adapt to breath-
takingly rapid social, economic, and ecological changes.
Signage along road to Boquillas Canyon Visitor Area,
Big Bend National Park, 2012
German and Austrian visitors at Zabriskie Point,

Death Valley National Park, 2013
Boquillas border crossing station (under construction) with photograph
by Ranger Bob Smith, Big Bend National Park, 2012
Timbisha Shoshone Tribe sign, Death Valley National Park, 2013

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INTRODUCTION

Inside National Parks

At the easternmost end of Big Bend National Park is Boquillas

ground a few feet away, identifying him as “Singing Mexican Vic-

Since these people pose no real threat, the relationship between

2006, four years after the border closure, protected wilderness

grounds of Yosemite Park while others were forcibly removed, the

points is the directive not to bring humanitarian aid items such as

and at what cost (to whom)? In short, how is the contemporary

The National Park Service (henceforth NPS) website is decorated

exception.” According to the vision of Frederick Law Olmsted,

society as a whole. At stake in 1865 was the universal, contempla-

But the turn to the scenic predates the invention of photogra-

ents the scene of nature for everyone to enjoy. In his writings,

template the scenic means, famously, a handful of cars pulled over

tended vehicles, visitors are well aware that “Singing Mexican

and protection, which becomes operative in what it means to

In Death Valley National Park, the word “homeland” is in even

sign identifies the park as “home of the Timbisha Shoshone,” and

reservation land gives rise to Death Valley’s particularly splintered

Pauline Esteves describes her people as having “always” lived

recognition was necessary to receive government aid to continue

The Homeland Act, an enormously significant event from the

Social inequalities, and the economic inequalities that both gener-

the visitor, rendering them unintelligible in political terms. Much

already begun to impact the national park to come, shaping the

German and Austrian visitors at Zabriskie Point,

Timbisha Shoshone Tribe sign, Death Valley National Park, 2013

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