But it's a dry heat: 'American Oasis' delves into how five cities successfully emerged from the deserts of the Southwest

In his debut book “American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest” author Kyle Paoletta explores the past and present of the region with the hope the rest of the country might learn to adapt.

Five cities are targeted in the book — Albuquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas, Nevada.

And when Paoletta explores, he’s not skimming. He digs far and deep to braid an immense range of subjects. Among them are history, geography, water, the desert, the heat, the sprawl and race relations.

But it's a dry heat: 'American Oasis' delves into how five cities successfully emerged from the deserts of the Southwest

Paoletta gets the job done with an incredible amount of skill and flair.

He delivers information in digestible chunks as a reporter or a magazine writer would.

He pauses to bring into play enticing anecdotes and profiles of locals who have given these cities their individual flavor.

Consider for example, a U.S. Army officer, who visited an Akimel O’odham Indian village in 1855. The officer, Paoletta notes, found land “irrigated by many miles of acequias, and our eyes were gladdened with the sight of rich fields of wheat ripening for the harvest … They grow cotton, sugar, peas, wheat and corn.”

Yet farmers in the nearby new Anglo settlement of Phoenix, however, found the Indigenous farmers’ methods incompatible with their own notion of cultivation — “rainfall follows the plow.”

Paoletta also quotes historian Bradford Luckingham as observing that Phoenix did not exist through Spanish and Mexican periods: “… It was founded largely by Anglos, for Anglos, and they were determined to transplant their familiar cultural patterns to their new home.”

In a 1920 Phoenix chamber of commerce directory, Paoletta writes, the city was described as a modern town of 40,000, “and the best kind of people, too. A very small percentage of Mexicans, negroes or foreigners.” A touch of white supremacy?

Boosterism helped — and still helps — drive Phoenix’s growth, promoting itself as a welcome mat for industry and for retirees.

The author is as interested in oddballs, lesser celebrities and rags-to-riches stories as he is in public figures who are influencers and decision makers.

Consider Paoletta’s profile of Franz Huning. He emigrated from Germany in 1848 and was headed for California after hearing stories in New Orleans of the wealth people were making on the West Coast.

Huning got as far as New Mexico, first stopping in Santa Fe and then in the Duke City. After working for fellow German émigré Simon Rosenstein in Albuquerque, Huning opened a dry goods store on the Old Town Plaza, then established a grist mill and a sawmill.

By the 1870s, Huning was a leading merchant in the New Mexico Territory, buying up acres and acres of land near where a track for a new railroad track was to be laid. His enormous home was called the Huning Castle.

The book also teaches a lot about the collaborative leadership of Pueblo Revolt leader Po’pay, about Reies López Tijerina’s efforts to restore Spanish land grants to their rightful heirs, and the struggles of literary genius of Chicano writer Jimmy Santiago Baca.

Consider El Paso private investigator Jay J. Armes (born Julian Armas) who lost both hands in an accident as a child. Armes received flash celebrity status when he appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s late-night show “Good Night America.”

Armes also caused an uproar when, as a member of El Paso’s city council, he brought in a novelty clock that looked like a bomb. City Hall had to be evacuated.

Consider next the Kim Sisters, three young Korean singers and multi-instrumentalists who came to Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1959. They had a long run in Vegas lounges after their first appearance on TV’s “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Paoletta writes they finally retired in the early ’90s, having become “just another outdated performance troupe coasting on nostalgia …”

Paoletta discusses a mass street demonstration in 1970 to protest the Nevada welfare benefits denied poor Black mothers. The protesters — who included César Chávez and civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy — shut down gambling at several hotels on the strip.

A portion of the chapter on Tucson pays attention to the power of the clergy-based Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s that helped thousands of undocumented Salvadoran refugees fleeing political violence find shelter, food and water on the U.S. side of the Mexican border.

The book also looks at the government and church organizations aiding undocumented refugees in Ciudad Juárez and in El Paso.

Paoletta gratefully uses a page or two for Impressionistic, chapter-introducing rubrics. For instance, driving from Las Cruces to Alamogordo, the author sees on one shoulder “… a predictable expanse of grama grass broken up by the occasional sage-colored creosote bush or the high stalk of a soaptree yucca.”

After stopping for coffee in Alamogordo, he heads to El Paso on U.S. 54: “Dark clouds approached from the southwest, probably one of those systems that starts in the Sea of Cortez and then cranks east all the way to the Great Plains. Again the road split: to the right a mammoth bank of cerulean vapor; to the left, an untroubled sky of periwinkle blue …”

Paoletta, born in Santa Fe and raised in Albuquerque, attended Albuquerque Academy before earning a bachelor’s in English from Tufts University and a master’s in fiction from Columbia University. His reporting and criticism have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times and other publications, and he’s worked as a fact-checker for magazines.

The 34-year-old author is starting to think about what his next book project might look like. “I think I will be zooming out of the Southwest to more of a national picture. I’m interested in the interplay of cities and rural areas, of America and the imagination,” Paoletta said in a phone interview from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.