White Sands

Abstract

White Sands KJ Cerankowski (bio) Most people wouldn't think of southern New Mexico as a place a person might go to lean into their queerness. San Francisco or New York, Paris or Berlin, certainly, but an alabaster expanse of Southwestern desert that abuts a U.S. military missile range? Seems unlikely. Yet, drifting among the white sands of the arid New Mexican desert was exactly where I found myself when I—I suppose—"found myself." Though to be clear: this is not a saccharine story of coming out or embarking on some self-discovery journey in the wilds of nature to test my mettle, emerging from the brush as a more evolved or enlightened version of myself. For sure, I knew I was queer long before I set foot in any desert, or forest, for that matter. Hell, anyone could take one look at me and know it. I just didn't yet know what new shapes that queerness could take. This is more a story of happenstance, of the overlay of landscape and body and history, and the worlds of possibility that materialize in our intersubjective becomings. ________ Let me begin this tale at an entrance: "One adult and one child?" the park ranger asks as J pulls her station wagon up to the window of the entrance booth at White Sands National Park. (Technically, it was still a national monument at the time of our visit, and key to this entry point to the story is the fact that the entrance fee was calculated per person rather than per vehicle, as it is now, under the dictates of the National Park Service). I no longer remember the exact fees, but it was something like five dollars per adult over the age of sixteen and free admission for anyone under age sixteen. I sit quietly in the passenger seat, smiling to myself, knowing the ranger perceives me to be a child of the age sixteen or younger. Most likely, I imagine, she thinks I am a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy. Both J and I being broke graduate students, I am admittedly thrilled at the prospect of saving the five-dollar fee. That could go a long way toward cheap beers at the dive in Las Cruces later. But following my parsimonious glee, another pleasure hums through my veins. She thinks I'm a boy, I think to myself. A boy. J looks at me. I grin at J. She then sighs heavily and turns back toward the window. "Two adults," she asserts, with a hint of irritation in her voice. The woman shrugs, takes our money, hands us some park maps and brochures, and off we go. We enter the park just as the visitor center is closing, the sun purpling the sky on the horizon, the white dunes sprawled out before us. It is mid-July. The only comfortable time to visit the dunes in the summer months is within those few hours between the time the sun starts dropping in the sky and the hour after sunset when the park closes and the rangers sweep every last vehicle from the pullouts along Dunes Drive. It also happens to be the time you would be most likely to sneak a sighting of the "white dread" or "white terror," sometimes called "Pavla Blanca" or "La Pavura Blanca," the ghost of [End Page 54] a woman named Mañuela who, adorned in her bridal gown, scours the mounds of sand in search of her lover, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Luna, who set off from Mexico City in 1540 in search of cities of gold and streets of jewels to the north. After the expedition failed to turn up any riches to claim as their own, de Luna and his thieving crew turned back south, where they met with Apache resistance to the sprawl of Spanish colonization across the region, staunch refusal to simply turn over the land for settlement and capital trade. As the white dust settled in the aftermath of the battle, de Luna's bones, too, settled amongst the fields of white grain. He died trying to stake a claim on what was never rightfully...