Marginalization

I’ve acknowledged before that living in El Valle involves both privilege and deprivation. The privilege is the fact that we’re not dependent on wage labor, i.e., a nine to five job in a designated location, and can therefore live where we want, in a relatively isolated community that is beautiful, friendly, and restorative. The deprivation comes from living on a very limited income, where we don’t enjoy the luxuries most middle class folks take for granted—that is, until the economy tanked again and lots of middle class folks have lost their jobs, their new cars (I’ve never owned a new car), and even their houses. So while I wouldn’t wish any of this on anyone, except the bankers, Wall Street traders, and complicit politicians who brought us to this point (that comes to a lot of exceptions), the trade off has definitely paid off.

But as the years go by, the privileged part of getting to live someplace out of the way is being assaulted by a world that, in its march toward collective consumerism (cities) and globalization (see Global Domination), apparently would like nothing better than to marginalize us out of existence. As the “home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time—space compression (David Harvey)”, it seems we spend way too much time on the phone trying to tell a computer that there really is a little village in northern New Mexico where you can send a package to our mailbox or door. We have this rural mailing address that says Box 6 El Valle Route, Chamisal (where the post office is located), New Mexico. This address gets rejected by computers that recognize only addresses that have numbers and streets or P.O. Box numbers. So we tell the computer — or very rarely, a person — that it’s OK, just let the computer change our address to P.O. Box 6, because as long as the name of the town, Chamisal, is in the address, the postmistress, who knows who everybody is, will make sure it gets delivered by the highway contract mailman to that green mailbox number 6 sitting at the head of our driveway.

Even she can’t compensate for some confusion, however. We were once given a subscription to the Sunday New York Times by a friend. After finally verifying that we did indeed exist, we got our first issue on the Monday after the Sunday it came out. We were ecstatic. The next Monday, there it was again in the mailbox. The next Monday there was no paper, and it didn’t come Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, either. But there it was on Monday morning, along with the new issue that actually came the day it was supposed to. From then on, on Mondays we either had no paper, or two papers, but I guess the Book Review and Arts and Entertainment section are never really dated for us, as we have to wait for new books to get to the library anyway (and take our turn on the request list, usually about thirty spots down) and we don’t often get to New York to go to the jazz clubs (I think the last time was around 1995).

United Parcel Service is another story. The main artery for northern New Mexico deliveries is in Santa Fe. There used to be a branch center in Española, the town of any size closest to us, and the man who made the deliveries to all of our little villages picked up his truck there. He, like the postmistress, knew everyone on his route. It didn’t matter how mangled the address was, even as UPS tightened up its requirements on rural addressing, if the name was on the package, Wilfredo got it to the right house. Alas, Wilfredo eventually retired. I think it took us a year to figure out what the current UPS regulations required for shipping, but once we got it right it didn’t mean we got our packages on the stipulated delivery day. The package may get sent out from Santa Fe, but if there’s no other delivery in El Valle that day, the driver doesn’t want to drop by. If it’s been raining or snowing, which is usually the case nine months out of the year, and our well maintained dirt road is wet, the driver may decide not to stop by. If we finally get the phone number of UPS in Santa Fe (they only list a central 800 number in the phone book, where you end up talking to someone in India) and tell them to just keep the package there until we come in to get it, they send it out anyway and the driver doesn’t deliver it because we’re not home, we’re in Santa Fe getting the package that isn’t there.

But I have no right to complain, really, because if I have these expectations that means I should move to town where the rest of the folks in the industrialized world conduct business, buy things, and communicate with people around the world without worry or complaint. Except for when the U.S. Postal Service deconstructs, which it did a couple of years ago, and everyone in Santa Fe started getting everyone else's mail, getting mail two months after it was sent, or not getting any mail at all, and went ballistic. The New Mexico congressional delegation had to intervene to demand better service for its constituents. While all this wasn’t as bad as the current meltdown of the entire financial system, it’s another reason I think I’ll just stay here.