The Ends of the American Dream

What becomes of the imaginary of the good life when the conditions that have made it possible—and aspirational—are imperiled? To answer this question, this dissertation examines the ecological and political-economic effects of the retirement communities that have populated the Southwest since the 1950s. There, white retirees' desires and expectations of post-work leisure have shaped the region, causing the growth of water extraction infrastructures, high housing development, and a politically conservative electorate. These repercussions have created immense pressure on the region and on the collective imaginary of the good life, which is today under threat of collapse in the face of unprecedented drought due to climate change; political-economic retrenchment; and kinship structures that have privileged the nuclear family over intergenerational care. This project, in other words, how the very conditions that made the good life imagined by the American Dream possible has also assured its disappearance. This research argues that ethnographic attention to the Desert West provides an analytical framework for examining the limitations of both the economic and ecological notions of abundance that have been at the heart of the expansion of American Empire—and how this abundance has reached its limits. Ultimately this project argues that the imaginary of the good life rests at the heart of contemporary settler-colonialism, which sowed the seeds of its own destruction in its initiation.

Within the problem-space of retirement communities in the Desert West, this dissertation identifies three analytical objects that have shaped the fantasy of abundance and imaginary of the good life—and thus the functioning of contemporary settler-colonialism. I argue that kinship, water ecologies, and leisure all rest at the heart of the contemporary formation of settler-colonialism at the edges of American Empire. To that effect, this dissertation reconceptualizes analytics from classic literature on kinship (Schneider 1972; Carston 2000; Sahlins 2013) to explore how the middle-class nuclear family model has remade kinship expectations and experiences for American families that do not share care burdens or live geographically proximal to each other; expands an understanding of the way that water infrastructures, development of planned communities, and planning for future resource degradation create limiting beliefs around stability and loss (Ballestero 2019; Muehlebach 2023); and offers a conceptualization of the way leisure has become, in the American Southwest, a function of imperial claims to resource extraction, the expansion of whiteness at the expense of indigeneity, and as a modern formulation of frontier logics (Wolfe 2006; Estes 2019; Bessire 2021).