"Power
Lines" examines conflicts over metropolitan growth and electrical energy
development in the Southwest from 1945 to 1975. These conflicts involved urban
boosters and politicians, electrical utilities, African Americans and Latinos,
environmentalists, and Navajo and Hopi peoples in struggles over the
organization of geographical space and the distribution of political power. Focusing
on the relationship between the Colorado Plateau and Phoenix, Albuquerque, and
Los Angeles, the dissertation explores how urban growth and demands for
electrical power reshaped space in the Southwest, linking Navajo and Hopi lands
on the Colorado Plateau to the surrounding "Sunbelt" cities. The
dissertation utilizes diverse sources: contracts between power companies and
tribes, records of electric utilities, reports from the federal Bureau of
Reclamation and Department of the Interior, correspondence and oral histories
of local, state, and federal officials, promotional materials from urban
boosters, papers and publications of various environmental organizations,
Indian and African American newspapers, and the records of the Navajo Nation. "Power
Lines" uses these materials to argue that metropolitan growth and energy
development blurred the differences between urban and non-urban space and
created new conceptions of space for Southwestern peoples. At the same time,
metropolitan growth and energy development increased the power of the urban
Southwest over the Colorado Plateau and reinforced existing hierarchies of race
and class.
The
dissertation is organized in three sections. The first section examines the
efforts of boosters and politicians in Phoenix to create and manage growth.
Creating growth, for these civic and commercial leaders, meant constructing
Phoenix as the modern center of the Southwest: a clean, sunny place perfect for
energy-intensive "space age" industries and middle-class leisure and
consumption. Managing growth involved annexing rapidly growing sections of the
Valley of the Sun while reinforcing the segregation of African Americans and
Latinos to ensure the city retained its middle-class, White reputation. The
second section explores power production and environmental transformation on
the Colorado Plateau. Improvements in transmission technology, attempts to
avoid urban pollution, and changes in federal Indian policy all led electrical
utilities to begin locating power plants near coal resources on the Navajo
Reservation. During these years, urban consumers in Phoenix, Albuquerque and
Los Angeles used power produced on Navajo lands, production that was distant
and hidden from their daily lives. The final section investigates attempts by
environmentalists and Navajos to manipulate the new relationships between the
metropolitan Southwest and the Colorado Plateau for their own purposes.
Environmentalists moved from largely supporting coal-fired plants as
alternatives to Colorado River dams to critiquing the plants as environmentally
destructive symbols of urban America's flawed consumer ideology. At the same
time, Navajo leaders sought to use resource development to fashion a version of
Navajo nationalism based primarily on material, rather than cultural,
underpinnings. Other Navajos fought to block energy development on their
immediate landscapes, fighting not only power companies but also elected Navajo
officials.
This dissertation
challenges existing expectations of postwar urban and political history. By
centering the history of the urban Southwest on the land lying between the
region's growing cities, it understands Native American land and labor as vital
factors in the growth of the urban Southwest. By considering cities as material
entities, sustained by elaborate environmental networks, it shows the hidden
spatial changes that urban growth required. At the same time, "Power Lines"
reflects recent work on federalism, rights, and racial formation. It
demonstrates how connections between local leaders and the federal government
met both local needs and federal policy goals. It explores how
environmentalists and Native Americans challenged this federal-urban cooperation
by putting new rights' claims to federal officials and popular audiences.
Finally, it shows metropolitan growth and energy development as key sites where
race and space were made in the postwar Southwest.