News
Editorial: A commitment to our land and heritage
Americans didn't invent the concept of branding, but we have certainly developed the idea perhaps as far as it will logically go.
Brands pervade our daily lives, shouting out from among the consumer noise: this one is real; this one is different. This state of affairs has its pros and cons to be sure, but one recent branding exercise could turn out to be entirely positive.
This week, U.S. Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords, both Arizona Democrats, promised to introduce legislation to designate a 3,300-square-mile area from Marana to the border a National Heritage Area, essentially branding as the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area a few thousand years of human activity along the mostly erstwhile Santa Cruz River.
The plan casts a wide net, and its organizing body, the nonprofit Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance, has pulled in nearly every cultural, historic, and economic activity ever plied along the banks or the immediate hinterlands of the once mighty Santa Cruz.
Heritage areas are often compared to enterprise zones, a concept popular in economic development circles.
Enterprise zones, put simply, are loose affiliations of like-minded industries operating toward a similar goal in a cohesive region. While enterprise zones often come with significant tax breaks, a heritage area has access to millions in federal matching funds that can be used to encourage preservation and economic development, mostly of the low-impact tourism variety.
The West has been slow to embrace the concept—only two Heritage Areas exist east of the Mississippi—and the Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Area would be the largest ever created in this part of the country.
Research Archaeologist Jonathan Mabry, chairman of the alliance, asked why there weren't more heritage areas in the West during a recent conference on the subject and was given a typically Eastern-centric answer: "Perhaps the West has less heritage than the East." That's just nonsense.
The alliance's plans for the heritage area belie that statement right off. The group wants to promote the shared history of an area that has been inhabited longer than most other regions of North America (since at least 11,000 BCE), has been farmed at least since 2000 BCE, ranched and mined since 1680, and fought over by various tribes, cultures, and ethnic groups pretty much the entire time.
Along the way, a true melting pot has been created here, a mixture of Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo settlers whose mixing has created a new breed of American experience that deserves to be recognized and, if you will, branded.
So far, there has been no organized opposition to the idea, and why should there be? It is very Western-friendly in that it does not impose federal oversight onto private property and participation by landowners is optional.
By creating a heritage area in the Santa Cruz Valley, we can emphasize to ourselves and to those increasing numbers of visitors who want to come here and spend their time and money, both what we all have in common—most importantly, a love of and responsibility for our distinctive natural landscape—and also our divergent but parallel histories.
This will help us all to realize why we live here, and why we will stay here, giving us who dwell here along the banks of the Santa Cruz that most endangered of American concepts—the true sense of place.
Brands pervade our daily lives, shouting out from among the consumer noise: this one is real; this one is different. This state of affairs has its pros and cons to be sure, but one recent branding exercise could turn out to be entirely positive.
This week, U.S. Reps. Raul Grijalva and Gabrielle Giffords, both Arizona Democrats, promised to introduce legislation to designate a 3,300-square-mile area from Marana to the border a National Heritage Area, essentially branding as the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area a few thousand years of human activity along the mostly erstwhile Santa Cruz River.
The plan casts a wide net, and its organizing body, the nonprofit Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance, has pulled in nearly every cultural, historic, and economic activity ever plied along the banks or the immediate hinterlands of the once mighty Santa Cruz.
Heritage areas are often compared to enterprise zones, a concept popular in economic development circles.
Enterprise zones, put simply, are loose affiliations of like-minded industries operating toward a similar goal in a cohesive region. While enterprise zones often come with significant tax breaks, a heritage area has access to millions in federal matching funds that can be used to encourage preservation and economic development, mostly of the low-impact tourism variety.
The West has been slow to embrace the concept—only two Heritage Areas exist east of the Mississippi—and the Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Area would be the largest ever created in this part of the country.
Research Archaeologist Jonathan Mabry, chairman of the alliance, asked why there weren't more heritage areas in the West during a recent conference on the subject and was given a typically Eastern-centric answer: "Perhaps the West has less heritage than the East." That's just nonsense.
The alliance's plans for the heritage area belie that statement right off. The group wants to promote the shared history of an area that has been inhabited longer than most other regions of North America (since at least 11,000 BCE), has been farmed at least since 2000 BCE, ranched and mined since 1680, and fought over by various tribes, cultures, and ethnic groups pretty much the entire time.
Along the way, a true melting pot has been created here, a mixture of Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo settlers whose mixing has created a new breed of American experience that deserves to be recognized and, if you will, branded.
So far, there has been no organized opposition to the idea, and why should there be? It is very Western-friendly in that it does not impose federal oversight onto private property and participation by landowners is optional.
By creating a heritage area in the Santa Cruz Valley, we can emphasize to ourselves and to those increasing numbers of visitors who want to come here and spend their time and money, both what we all have in common—most importantly, a love of and responsibility for our distinctive natural landscape—and also our divergent but parallel histories.
This will help us all to realize why we live here, and why we will stay here, giving us who dwell here along the banks of the Santa Cruz that most endangered of American concepts—the true sense of place.
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