American Oasis

Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest

By: Kyle Paoletta

Narrated by: Andrew Eiden

An expansive and revelatory historical exploration of the multicultural, water-seeking, land-destroying settlers of the most arid corner of North America, arguing that in order to know where the United States is going in the era of mass migration and climate crisis we must understand where the Southwest has already been

“A lively, thoughtful tour.”—The Los Angeles Times • “Elegant.”—The New Yorker

“Essential reading for understanding the forces shaping the modern Southwest—and, possibly, the planet’s future.”—New Mexico Magazine

Albuquerque. Phoenix. Tucson. El Paso. Las Vegas. Iconic American cities surrounded by desert and rust. Teeming metropolises that seem to exist independently of the seemingly inhospitable and arid landscape that surrounds them, belying the rich insight they offer into American stories of migration, industry, bloodshed, and rebirth.

Charting a geographic path through America's largest and hottest deserts, acclaimed journalist Kyle Paoletta maps the past and future of these cities, and the many other settlements from rural town to urban sprawl that make up the region that has come to be called “the American Southwest.” Weaving together the stories of immigrants and indigenous populations, American Oasis pulls back the layers of settlement, sediment, habit, and effect that successive empires have left on the region, from the Athapascan, Diné, Tewa, Apache, and Comanche, to the Spanish, Mexican, and, finally, American.

As Paoletta’s journey into the Southwest’s history becomes inextricably linked to an exploration of its dependency on water, he begins to ask: where, ultimately, will cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix find themselves once the Colorado River and its branches dry up? Richly reported and sweeping in its history, American Oasis is the story of what one iconic region’s past can tell us about our shared environmental and cultural future.

Historical context for SW sprawl

Well written. I enjoyed this audiobook. Lots of information about SW cities I had never heard before. I think I misunderstood the subtitle. I was originally drawn to this book thinking it was about how the southwest metropolis cities can sustain themselves in the future when they’ve already outpaced the resources of the landscapes they are situated on. There is some discussion of that towards the end but the book is mostly historical context for how the cities came to be. Every chapter was interesting.