Other Worlds Just Like This One: Enchantment at Meow Wolf’s “The House of Eternal Return”

Abstract

Santa Fe, New Mexico is one of the most iconic cities in the United States, devoted to its distinctive architectural image. Meow Wolf (MW), a Santa Fe–based art collective that began in 2008, has gained widespread attention for their acid-dipped large-scale immersive installations because their first permanent location opened in their home city in 2016. This article interrogates what ideals the attraction depends on and unwittingly encourages, integrating architectural history, cultural, and ethnic studies, to challenge MW’s self-narration against their flagship product in a close reading of the attraction itself, blending ethnographic description, art reviews, and journalism. This article situates MW within a longer history of New Mexico’s tourist image and considers the relationship between artists and how we imagine or script fantasies about place.

This article focuses on the “anchor spaces” of Meow Wolf (MW)’s House of Eternal Return and considers how the attraction uses domestic space and a correspondingly fictional family to produce a fantasy of homeownership. I ask what ideals the attraction depends on and unwittingly encourages, integrating architectural history, cultural, and ethnic studies, to challenge MW’s self-narration against their flagship product in a close reading of the attraction itself, blending ethnographic description, art reviews, and journalism. I situate the art collective’s House of Eternal Return as a twenty-first century addition to a pantheon of attractions that have produced, promoted, and naturalized New Mexico’s tourist image, represented by Santa Fe.

The city’s distinctive style is the result of a “constellation of arts and architectural revival, public ceremony, romantic literature, and historic preservation [that provide] a unifying vision of the city, its people, and their history, and that has fostered one of the most active art and myth-making centers in the United States.” ¹ MW’s aesthetic departures from its home city’s signature style are obvious and notable, but that does not make it immune from myth-making or similar questions about the role of art in a city that has crafted its image for tourists. Architectural historian Chris Wilson has shown how Santa Fe’s distinctive adobe-styled buildings play an integral role in promoting this image which he terms “the myth of Santa Fe,” an architectural aestheticization of the state’s rhetoric of tricultural harmony between Native Americans, Anglo-Americans, and Hispanos. ² Anthropologist Sylvia Rodriguez has identified the myth, the constellation that bore it, and the tourism that sustains it as the state’s “enchantment industry” ³ —a term that usefully helps visualize New Mexico’s “Land of Enchantment” tourist image as the ideological and economic workings behind the myth of Santa Fe. For Rodriguez, art in New Mexico is “heavily inscribed . . . with racial meaning,” the site of “connection between the tourist gaze and whiteness.” ⁴ Although MW’s House does not bear immediate resemblances to the stereotypes of New Mexican art, the artists work within the context of the myth of Santa Fe and are part of the state’s enchantment industry. Enchantment means very little if everyone knows that magic is a fabrication. ⁵ I understand enchantment a container that unifies its contents and structures a fantasy of encountered difference, which I elaborate on in other sections. Enchantment names how conflicting cultural and business interests in New Mexico diligently plan and execute ersatz environments and narrative products. I use enchantment to interpret the distance between reality and fantasy, and their mutually constructed, co-constitutive relationship through art, place, and narration. These points of connection are intrinsic to art as expressive practices and as objects that exist and move in art worlds, made by actors within markets, and responses with “economic consequences.” ⁶ Thinking through enchantment sensitizes me to the often-contradictory turns taken by cultural institutions while keeping in mind that many individual people are acting in good faith. These dynamics are present in the House’s narrative, design choices, and the collective’s transformation into a company. The following sections tour the House, introduce the collective, and situate the House within a larger history of Santa Fe’s tourist image. I provide a close reading of the anchor spaces of the House and Portals Bermuda and conclude by asking what the House might tell us about artists and the places they help make.

Within a year of opening to the public, the House of Eternal Return made over $6 million in revenue. ⁷ The stratospheric cashflow was interpreted as proof that MW satiated a craving for an “elsewhere” or “otherwise” within the wastelands of late capitalism with what they called their first permanent installation, a 20,000 square foot facility in Santa Fe, NM. This logic was met by the attention of venture capitalist funding, partnerships that would ultimately change the structure of the original art-by-artists organization. By 2023, MW had opened locations in Denver, CO; Las Vegas, NV; and Grapevine, TX, with announcements the following year for Houston and Los Angeles locations. ⁸ It is imperative that MW be understood as an art collective turned corporation and the House of Eternal Return as an attraction. A feat of interactive artwork, sculpture, and design, the House materializes narrative choices and aesthetic environments that coalesce in New Mexico under the rubric of enchantment.

A Textual Tour of “The House of Eternal Return”

One of my childhood friends has grown up but she wants to play, and we find ourselves in Santa Fe, driving away from the tourist heavy, pedestrian friendly Santa Fe Plaza and down Cerrillos Road, one of Santa Fe’s central commercial arteries. We notice multiple autoshops, fast food restaurants, and modest homes in the area fall away when we turn onto Rufina Circle Drive. Slightly below Cerrillos Road, MW is nestled between the newer looking cannabis dispensary, brewery, aroma therapy shop, barbeque spot, architectural metal shop, and tortilleria immediately surrounding it. MW is on its own little hill, the parking lot is packed, a food truck in front of the entrance sells shaved ice. A bowling pin shaped sign is the only reminder of the previous tenant: Silva Lanes, a bowling alley. Now it props up the nonsensical pairing “Meow Wolf” in the sky, marking the entrance to the parking lot. After passing through the lobby entrance, flanked by a spacious gift shop on the right and a café to the left, we are directed down a short hallway where a video that resembles a Black Lodge scene from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks plays, instructing us to treat the environment with care. ⁹ A pair of heavy doors block the intrusion or escape of sound and light. We pass through these doors and are greeted by a staggering trompe l’oeil, having stepped onto a lawn leading to what looks like a full-scale façade of a two-story Victorian house. Curiously, this house is set in Mendocino, California, a minimum of a twenty-hour drive (1,294 miles) away. Within steps, New Mexico has vanished. Sounds of crickets fill a perpetual nighttime air and the house’s soft yellow lights appear inviting. An overflowing mailbox hints nobody has been home for some time now. Dragon details in the eaves complement a doormat that warns “Beyond Here There Be Dragons.” Arts and Crafts style shingles take on the appearance of scales. ¹⁰ Spanning two floors, the House of Eternal Return is astonishingly spacious. To the right of the entrance is a fish tank bordering the living room with a roomy fireplace. To the left is a small sunroom with a canvas, table with painting materials and chair. The other side of the wall opens to a flight of stairs. The foyer leads to a full dining area where the roof looks like it might be made of pooling plasma, a chandelier is mangled, the wall is melting, the mirror flickering. The area opens to a roomy midcentury style kitchen with pastel pink and green checkerboard linoleum flooring. The all-white cabinetry, full ceramic double sink, refrigerator, appear to be from the 1950s.

Implicitly an extension of our world, the House of Eternal Return uses the familiar setting and scale of domestic life as a visual introduction to MW’s self-referential multiverse: the aquatic world of the fish-tank becomes and underwater forest, a skeletal mastodon model in a child’s room becomes xylophonic remains in a cave, and even a missing pet hamster is on an adventure, reappearing throughout the attraction. Drawings pinned on the wall manifest as full-sized environments. Like citations, which provide references to sources or further detail within a text, these elements connect artifacts across settings, recalling previous scales of encounter that toggle between the home’s interior spaces and the attraction’s larger external environment. Immersion within the narrative is accomplished subtly and slowly by exploring the structure and piecing together clues. The internal-external movement of objects and environment mirror affective motions wherein the subject internalizes places and attendant emotions or memories. In other words: the immersive quality is not just tactile, informed by physical environments but emotional, a subjective response to an aesthetic atmosphere.

The attraction’s storyline centers the fictional Selig/Pastore family, who have vanished from this dimension and whose imaginations have materialized in their family home. Visitors are encouraged to track down and piece together an archive of audio recordings, home video, correspondence, journals, and notes as clues to fill in the House’s storyline. Snippets of video and audio featuring this family are also looped into the other worlds, implied glimmers of a recent past, engaging visitors in the storyline throughout. Each world also has a soundscape, specifically composed music that helps establish distinct parts of the multiverse (available for purchase on CD in the giftshop). Playful variety of movement and invitation to misuse various domestic objects foster a child friendly sense of adventure. Subtle distinctions present each option as unique choices, avoiding monotony and inviting curiosity, furthered by visually diverse destinations. From the ground floor of the house, we can crawl through the fireplace to a cave with a musical skeleton; the washing machine contains a slide to a forest; or walk through the refrigerator to an inter-dimensional vacation resort.

Multiple doors (“portals”) offer options to the caves and forest. Intricate hallways and corridors of static television screens or display cases with illegible script lead to an area with neatly spaced outlines of buildings. An eclectic combination of kitschy objects and neon ornamentation in fluorescent piping, “Fancy Town” communicates a sense of intentional planning and construction resembling a town square and featuring a modest stage that MW also operates as a music and performance venue. From this open area, visitors can inspect the periphery of the space to enter sections of “Art City,” a series of small rooms decorated by different artists.

Collective to Corporation

MW’s metamorphosis from a “penniless” and “anarchic” art collective to real estate investment charts how “[a]rt is never neutral, and its origins map cultural shifts and the dynamic of power.” ¹¹ This section uses the collective’s own telling of their history to explore how political institutions, financial interests, and cultural workers collaborate. Anthropologist Nancy Parezo has aptly noted how the pervasive idea and false notion “. . . that art is divorced from economic and marketing, that economics can only corrupt [obscures the] reality is that art is a special type of commodity that has economic value and is sold in markets.” ¹² Parezo further reminds us that art and

[a]rtists, like consumers and collectors, do not work in social vacuums; they are players in “art worlds,” which consist of the artists themselves and individuals who assist with the art—from the people and firms that produce raw materials, to those who market, display, and sell the art, to audiences and consumers, to critics who enhance reputations . . .

In a gesture toward a larger external art world, Vince Kadlubek, one of MW’s founding members, commissioned Meow Wolf: Origin Story, a documentary carefully narrating the collective’s first decade of operation–starting with their formation in 2008–artistic pursuits, ambitious productions, and struggles leading up to opening the House in 2016 and its immediate success. Premiering at South by Southwest 2018, Origin Story is a savvy marketing and public relations move. MW has since become a frequent presenter at SXSW, often hosting panels on “immersive entertainment” and “world building.” The genre is reminiscent of Walt Disney’s addresses about the park which painted him as a “salt of the earth” folk-socialist prior to his conservative, anti-labor private paternalism that would later be echoed in figures like Ronald Reagan. ¹³ Overall, the documentary promotes the image of a band of enraptured artists with a dream. Presenting the history of the group as a rag-tag team of creative kids, Origin Storyfollows internal disagreements and ruptures toward repair and eventual success as the result of the power of art to bring people together. This trajectory emphasizes the original members’ existential desire and need to create art in community outside of Santa Fe’s galleries as the impetus for their formation. As the founders tell it, MW has always struggled with their commitment to be “punks” outside of the system and the capitalism of the art world, characterizing themselves as Santa Fe’s “orphans of neglect” with no space or support for expression. For MW’s story, exclusion is a catalyst and influence on their art practice. From the collective’s perspective, there was no reason to make “traditional” art for a system that they did not see themselves in: they were not individual painters and sculptors vying for solo-shows but a group seeking a collective footprint. By 2010, the collective went from renting a warehouse space they covered with murals and sculptures, wired by overloaded extension cords, to their first formal gallery show with “GEOcadent II.” A whimsical installation, GEOcadent used the armature of a geodesic dome to suspend post-1950s furniture and other household objects, creating the effect of a living room swirling in mid-air.

The following year, MW installed a seventy-five-foot ship in Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) 6,000 square foot gallery space. The show’s success catapulted MW to the art world’s attention, which the CCA proudly recognizes its own role in. While the CCA claims “There is no single exhibition event or film series that could illustrate the breadth of CCA’s place in cultivating and sharing exciting creative visions in Santa Fe,” their brief history section makes it clear that there is indeed a singular exhibition—MW’s Due Return, ran from May to July 2011. ¹⁴ The show generated $35,000 in donations, elevating the collective’s profile while also injecting a new air of relevance and excitement into the city’s gallery culture. MW’s sprawling, hyper detailed environments were assembled by mostly volunteer artists who had to teach themselves building, architecture, engineering, and safety requirements. The documentary features an overwhelmed Sean Di Ianni (one of MW’s founding members) struggling to accept his new role as the safety and city code enforcer while the group navigates improvised construction for an already ambitious, expensive, and physically demanding project. There is no denying that the group is uniquely specialized in and attuned to the production of environments. The Due Return also piloted story elements that would later reappear in the House: an interdimensional ship crossing space and time, anchored on an alien planet to harvest resources. The collective borrowed from the key elements of theme parks, incorporating sophisticated story and interactive gameplay to draw attendees into the environment.

In a 2019 New York Times Magazine (aptly titled “The Money Issue”) featured a long-from profile on MW as a leader in this brave new world of entertainment. The article asked, somewhat rhetorically, “Can an Art Collective Become the Disney of the Experience Economy?” and detailed that MW has been dismissed by the art world, but embraced by tech investors, real estate developers, and venture-capital funds. This trajectory appears as fundamentally at odds with how MW began. The profile implied a break between the visions of some of the original founders. Matt King ¹⁵ was quoted as saying that he does not “. . . even tell people anymore . . . I tell them I work in waste management.” Another founding member, Sean Di Ianni stated that “[n]ow there are employees of Meow Wolf who don’t know that about me . . . That I was an artist.” Their comments reflect a sense of loss of their identities: Di Ianni’s somber use of the past tense “was.” King’s wry comment about “waste management” indicates disgust, invoking refuse, the bureaucratic arm that contains it, the unglamorous or undesirable nature of such work. Should we take this as a Sopranos reference, it hints at the grisly questions of where the bodies are buried and who is calling the shots. Vocalized through ambivalence about what MW had become, both comments reflect discomfort, disappointment, and even exhaustion stemming from their specific roles within the group and the limits of artistic labor. The only member profiled that did not express dismay at what MW has become was Vince Kadlubek, who has become one of the organization’s most prominent members and has played a significant part in the development of MW from collective to company, which the documentary downplays.

MW’s willingness to corroborate the great U.S. fiction of individual merit appeals to an investor class that values feel-good, bootstrap narratives that depoliticize structural inequity. As a result, MW’s participation or association with real estate development aestheticizes the increasing thematization and privatization of public space while presenting that development as artistic expression. ¹⁶ MW’s installation art is attractive to real estate developer partners because the mode of production requires areas which the building trades already manage: space (rent), materials (expenses), and labor (wages), and maintenance. Speaking of MW’s expansion in Las Vegas, where the company is the anchor tenant for a commercial area called Area15, Kadlubek elaborated that MW was “. . . trying to do both big, unique locations but also replicated experiences . . . That could increase if we find that the replicable ones are successful, and the fact that they’re replicable doesn’t damage the brand.” ¹⁷ Kadlubek’s priority is to protect “the brand.” His remarks pragmatically understand that success will be measured by “replicated experiences” i.e. MW’s ability to reproduce the same product with slight variation depending on location (“uniqueness”). This shift from collective to an attractive “anchor tenant” has garnered the group a steady stream of revenue, attention, and fans, but criticism has been long present.

Writing for Hyperallergic, curator Erin Joyce has described it as “vaguely colonial” given that

[t]he interactive, two-story Victorian house is centered on the imagined story of a white family from California. This narrative, transplanted into a brown neighborhood in a city that is defined, predicated on, and commodified around Indigenous identity, can be read as tone-deaf at a moment in this country when decolonial narratives are prominent. ¹⁸

Joyce’s review echoed public outcry directed at MW. In 2016, a day after the House opened to the public, a hand-painted sign with capitalized script resembling Spanish decrees appeared in the parking lot. Bright red words against the sunflower yellow of the state flag flatly announced: “Welcome, Gentrifiers. Keep pushing us out! Consequence: we lose space, you lose culture. ¹⁹ ” Aesthetically, the sign referenced past conquests by Spain (calligraphy) and the United States (state flag colors) to place contemporary gentrification within a continued struggle of place. The sign’s presence and message disrupted the easy transference of the social space of the barrio to a site for tourism. By puncturing the shift in social space with its declarative presence, the sign also articulates a perceived impending class, racial, and cultural shift by identifying MW as “gentrifiers.” The sign functions to “[transform] civic projects designed to attract tourist dollars into something else, revealing layers of history hidden and razed.” ²⁰ and indicates the surrounding neighborhood’s position as witnesses of this change. In response to this anger, MW has presented itself as a positive presence by attaining Benefit corporation (B-Corp) status and claiming to work with communities. Many of the values of their B-Corp status are already requirements for them the receive state funds and city grants.

Across the profiles, interviews, and documentary, members insist MW exists because of Santa Fe. The city’s financial support is unmentioned in favor of elevating individual philanthropy. Fantasy author George R.R. Martin is presented as the collective’s greatest benefactor, having purchased the bowling alley space intended for the House for $2 million. Martin’s financial investment represents a seal of approval from a high-profile figure associated with elaborate worldbuilding and benefited MW’s PR image. This amount is dwarfed by the state and city amounts that have gone into growing and sustaining MW. By 2019, MW had received up to $910,000 ²¹ for job training, and $1.1 million in state and city grants. ²² The combined millions justify why a study of the collective’s productions are imperative for understanding how the state seeks to position itself and the strategies it deems worthy of pursuit. The initial grant of $60k MW received from the city in 2015 specified that MW had to comply with city requirements to secure funding. At the time, the Albuquerque Journal reported that the resolution required MW “employ a minimum of 40 people, with the aim of creating 30 full-time jobs and 35 part-time “retainable” jobs, at least twenty internship opportunities for Santa Fe University for Art and Design students and provide high-tech job training for employees and community members. It also calls for an online gift shop, the development of at least twenty-five exportable products and a minimum of six patent applications.” ²³ Since 2015, MW has been awarded two additional injections of capital from the state: $850,000 from the state Local Economic Development Act (LEDA) fund in 2017 (matched by an additional $250k in LEDA funding from the City of Santa Fe ²⁴ ), and a $528,283 state grant in 2019 for job training. ²⁵ The initial grant stipulated that MW had to produce at least six patents as well as sell merchandise. Ironically, while the art collective claimed to be rule breaking, the requirement to provide tangible deliverables proved to be essential for their project’s viability. MW’s artistic production became a quantifiable asset (patents, merchandise) that the state can claim as its intellectual property. In this way, capital closes in on artistic labor, foreclosing organic creative responses in favor of required output. Further, the state’s economic investment clarifies the shift from collective to corporation. MW’s offerings are exemplary of the twenty-first century’s digital thirst for stimuli and “immersion” as well as a unique development for arts practitioners to have a livable wage with benefits and have their craft recognized as valuable labor. That labor is internally curtailed as the company’s growth has been predicated on MW’s ability to conform to the demands, whims, desires, and trends in entertainment markets. While they may be heads of certain creative divisions within the company, none of the original founding members serve as CEOs. ²⁶ What is clear is that the state and city can point to MW as proof of their support of the arts and as an investment in New Mexico’s creative job sector. New Mexico’s money has fueled the company’s growth, but it has not protected the local workforce (or necessarily employed it, with many high-paid positions filed by out-of-state hires). ²⁷

Since the House opened, MW has faced multiple lawsuits from individual artists and the city of Santa Fe in a litany of cases ranging from copyright, stolen wages, and sexual discrimination. By undermining its most local community (workers) MW’s B-Corp status is a PR smokescreen for its internal failures. When asked about how the state might respond to a wave of pressure from workers demanding protections and back wages, New Mexico Department of Economic Development representative Bruce Krasnow said

We see this as a successful startup company. They pay benefits, they pay health insurance, their wages are much higher than average for the state of New Mexico . . . We look for jobs, we look for what their contribution is to the state, how many people they’re going to hire. Outside of that is not something we can really arbitrate. ²⁸

Effectively, the statement solidified the state’s unwillingness to intervene on behalf of New Mexican workers whose pay had been withheld by MW while financially backing the company. In 2020, the artists that maintain and produce MW’s projects unionized, exhausted by the company’s rapid acceleration to adopt corporate structures to serve its expansion. In the first spring of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost 250 workers were furloughed or fired, cutting the company’s numbers in half. The MW Workers Collective (a nominative nod to MW’s early days), in resisting their peripheralization, has proven that sustained labor organization is a powerful avenue to protect and recognize the work of artists and by extension, creative labor more generally. MW has made Santa Fe an inextricable part of itself and its PR strategy to cast itself as “rebellious” and “out there”—masking its shoddy labor practices and failure to critique the city’s inequalities and penchant for fantasy. MW has attracted a massive amount of consumer activity in an area that has otherwise not benefited from the city’s investment. If the city’s investment was an effort to “diversify the economy, revitalize an economically distressed neighborhood and provide a unique family entertainment option for Santa Fe,” the choice to do so by funding the artist collective is curious given the area’s limited public transportation, lack of new housing construction, or closer job opportunities.

Looking at the actual census block MW belongs to it does not appear that their presence has brought about the kind of cultural and economic shifts associated with the multipronged process of gentrification or the “revitalization” the city may have intended. According to 2022 American Community Survey 5-year estimates for the immediate area, residents were moving into the area before MW transformed Silva Lanes. ²⁹ If movement is a marker of gentrification, then that process began in the 1990s and continued until 2014, falling off in the period since 2015–16. The same data set shows that movement in this census block came from within it, indicating that people were moving in their neighborhood. These numbers do not support the perception of wealthy outsiders coming into the area. The area remains poor, with 28 percent of residents living below the poverty line (about double that of the city) and a $42,537 median household income, about three fifths below the city’s median of $67,663. Most workers leave the area for work, with 77 percent of residents driving alone for an average commute of almost twenty minutes, and only 1 percent using public transportation. Single unit, mobile homes, and multi-unit structures are almost equally represented in the block, and median home values for owner-occupied units from the ACS 2016 five-year estimates ($161,600) have grown steadily. The 2022 ACS captured the median home values for owner-occupied at $220,600.

According to the Santa Fe Association of REALTORS ™ State of Housing Report in 2022, the median price for single family homes in Santa Fe city has steadily increased since 2016 from $310,000 to $488,500, with the county jumping from $428,875 to $691,803. ³⁰ This perception is visually supported by the same report’s table of contents featuring MW’s bowling pin sign prominently in the center fold—a choice indicating that the professional organization recognizes MW as culturally significant within Santa Fe’s modern image, and as such sees MW as worthwhile framing device for the report alongside other markers of the city’s aesthetic culture and identity such as adobe walls, ristras (dried chiles), turquoise jewelry, historic civic buildings, and other western motifs. The choice also aligns with observations that, while MW may be shunned by the art world, it has been “embraced by real estate” in a move that pictorially repeats MW’s central claim to Santa Fe. This embrace can be better understood by situating what MW has created in Santa Fe as a continuation of the city’s myth-making and tourist image.

Imagined Environments: Santa Fe, MW, and Enchantment

The House is a microcosm of Santa Fe’s role as an incubator for the state’s strategies of political and cultural inclusion in the United States. I have previously mentioned that one of the most repeated claims made by popular coverage of MW and repeated by its original members, is that the collective and its art projects could only exist because of Santa Fe. Undoubtedly, this claim is bolstered by the city’s status as one of the country’s largest art markets, its galleries, and museum culture. How to make sense of MW’s distinctive artworks within Santa Fe’s tourist imagery, when so much of the city’s aesthetic is tied up in maintaining visual markers of “The City Different”? Here I speculate that Santa Fe provides MW with an audience that is already primed to anticipate and expect “difference.” Further, the city’s support of MW prompts me to ask what the city saw in the collective that aligned with an image of Santa Fe.

Today, Santa Fe comprises the third largest art market in the country. Two major arts festivals in the summer months of July and August, the International Folk Art Festival and the Southwest Association for Indian Arts Santa Fe Indian Market, attract artists and tourist shoppers from around the globe. Santa Fe, a city of 84,000 people, has 250 art galleries, many of them dedicated to traditional art forms by Native artists from the region. With its earliest iteration in the 1920s, the Santa Fe arts scene has been characterized by Anglo patron-philanthropists, anthropologists, and tourism. Although the focus of patron-philanthropists who established themselves as connoisseurs of Native American art was on the work of artists in Northern New Mexico, they also worked to promote Native artwork outside of New Mexico to new markets by establishing gallery-shops in Manhattan, traveling, and selling their vision of unique landscape—efforts that attracted New Mexico’s most famous transplant, Georgia O’Keefe. Another transplant was artist Will Shuster, a member of Los Cinco Pintores (The Five Painters), a group of Anglo-American painters who had moved to Santa Fe in the 1920s who wanted to make “art for the people.” ³¹ Shuster’s most prominent legacy is Zozobra, or “Old Man Gloom,” an effigy that has grown from a human six-foot to a humbling fifty-foot marionette that recently burned for the hundredth time. Rather famously, Shuster came up with the idea as a party event for Los Cinco Pintores. The name “zozobra” (meaning anxiety, gloom, restlessness, preoccupation, or anguish) was plucked from a Spanish language dictionary by his friend Dana Johnson, then editor of the local newspaper. ³² The whimsy and spontaneity of Zozozbra’s inception, what to English-speaking ears sounds like an improbable name, ambiguous racialization, populist roots (artists’ making art “for the people”), playfulness growing into public spectacle (effigy for a private party turned public event), art collective making a name for themselves in a single-artist dominated economy, strikes me as the most obvious antecedent to MW.

The conditions that gave rise to Zozobra’s creation and focus of Santa Fe’s contemporary galleries are linked to the successful efforts to shift valuations of commodities that concentrated in Santa Fe in the 1920s and 1930s. This cultural project ran parallel to the development of Pueblo Revival architecture and many of the same figures, such as Edgar Hewett and his museum staff. Art institutions in Santa Fe have grown more prominently diverse and international only recently: the 1953 founding of the International Museum of Folk Art (also established by a woman patron-philanthropist originally from Chicago), the establishment of the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1961, the formalization of the Southwest Association for Indian Arts’ Indian Market in 1971, and the CCA Santa Fe founding in 1975. However, it was not until the 1990s that three major art institutions established in Santa Fe cemented the city’s art scene as we know it today: the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in downtown Santa Fe (1991), SITE Santa Fe (1995), the Georgia O’Keefe Museum (1997). When MW’s founding artists describe their experience growing up in Santa Fe as not having an artistic space for them, they are recalling a city that was slowly expanding in terms of venues to see art aimed at the sensibilities of collectors of Native and Hispano arts: museums showcasing well established traditions, artists, and venues where collectors could go to learn about objects to inform their purchases.

This dynamic is best reflected in the history of the Southwest Association for Indian Arts sponsored Indian Market on the Santa Fe Plaza each August, which is the longest running event and backbone of the city’s art market, generating around $160 million for artists. ³³ Anthropologist Molly Mullin has written about how Santa Fe’s Indian Market specifically, and by extension, the valuation of Native American art, is tied to institutions and figures in 1920s–1930s Santa Fe who brought together discourses of art and anthropology. Wealthy patron-philanthropists such as Martha and Elizabeth White, whose property and boosterism of Native American arts are largely responsible for the current grounds of the School for Advanced Research (SAR), the center’s status as center for the study of anthropology and art, extensive collection of Native American pottery, and one of the city’s premiere arts festivals, paired the legitimating powers of anthropological discourse, museums, and galleries to see Native American works as “art, not ethnology.” ³⁴ Hewett and his staff were heavily involved in the promotion of art and local tradition, having connected the arts fairs to Santa Fe’s Fiesta celebration commemorating the city’s Spanish past, specifically the reconquest of the city after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. ³⁵ Mullin notes that ironically, the spectacle of “imperial nostalgia” did not interfere with the promotion of Native American arts. ³⁶ The advocacy of women patron-philanthropists played central roles in the development of the Indian Market through their work in the New Mexico chapter of what was then called the Southwest Association of Indian Affairs. In 1922, Hewett and Kenneth Chapman at the Museum of New Mexico organized weekly “fairs” for Native American artists to sell their work and win prizes. The “fairs” became “Indian markets” in 1936, under Maria Chabot, a young Texan who had traveled to Mexico and had some anthropological training who had come to Santa Fe at the invitation of Margaretta Dietrich, then director of the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs, after meeting Dietrich and other Santa Feans in Mexico City in 1934. Chabot’s time in Mexico had given her an appreciation for markets as diverse and unique gathering spaces, and she sought to replicate these qualities by in Santa Fe by having the central plaza become the venue for Native artists to sell their work. ³⁷ The efforts of these figures to preserve and safeguard what they saw as the “authentic” Santa Fe from the threat of “mass culture”—tourists who they saw as uneducated, ignorant, and tasteless consumers— shaped and established many of the arts institutions and culture of the city that are now considered emblematic of Santa Fe’s identity.

That vision of the city has since been crowned with a UNESCO “Creative City” designation in 2003 and in 2017, National Geographic magazine awarded Santa Fe their “World Legacy” prize for “Sense of Place.” The prize is a partnership between National Geographic and ITB Berlin, the entity that sponsors the world’s largest tourism trade show. The magazine’s description of the award lists recognition of an “. . . enhance[ed] sense of place and authenticity, including support for the protection of historical monuments, archaeological sites, cultural events, indigenous heritage and artistic traditions.” The joint ITB and National Geographic press release announcing the award winners described Santa Fe thusly:

If American pioneers from more than a century ago were to visit Santa Fe’s central plaza today, they would recognize it instantly. The oldest state capital in America considers safeguarding its rich heritage a duty and a passion. The historic downtown and surrounding area protect archaeological sites and cultural authenticity, including the Santa Fe Indian Market, now almost 100 years old and still going strong. Santa Fe’s annual festivals and events place Native American, Spanish, and Anglo heritage front and center, while strong sustainability initiatives also bring the past into the future. ³⁸

The prize for “Sense of Place” locates authenticity in maintaining spaces (downtown, surroundings, archeological sites) and events (Indian Market) associated with the city’s past through settler eyes: “If American pioneers . . . were to visit . . . they would recognize it instantly.” But the past is not as distant as the tourism award would suggest. Rather, it is revealing of what kinds of environments or expectations are privileged in the marketing and selling of specific landscapes. In an article connecting the display and commodification of the Southwest for tourist consumption to the symbolic “ludic enterprise” of Disneyland and EPCOT, folklorist Marta Weigle wrote that

[e]ngineering ethnic tourism in the Southwest was first the province of the Santa Fe/Fred Harvey corporation and the publicists, artists, literati, anthropologists, guides and service personnel employed by them. They managed to transform the region into a Midway Plaisance, an amusement zone for the ‘geography of the ideal’ . . . that California represented. ³⁹

Weigle pointed toward Disneyland as the newest iteration of the techniques of display crafted by Fred Harvey (the “Great Civilizer of the West”) and his partnerships with railways. Here, in my discussion of MW, I find myself thinking that all roads lead back to Santa Fe: the New Mexico Cliff Dwellers display, promoted as representative of “the last castles of an extinct race” at the Columbian World’s Fair Exposition of 1893 was featured on the Midway Plaisance. ⁴⁰ Tourist imagery translated the physical terrain of the Southwest into a series of tropes and amusements that could be recognized and thus navigated by pedestrians at fairs and later by travelers on trains and automobile. Within that visual collapse, New Mexico’s landscape blurred into California. MW whisking visitors to California reflects a subtle choice that further cements the HoER within a history of make-believe placemaking in the region, following Disney and Harvey’s tourist playscapes for the middle-class leisure pursuits of their times.

MW’s multiverse continues these pursuits today by producing its own settings. The HoER is “fiction set in imaginary worlds that differ from the modern world in ways that science [cannot] explain . . . of magical and supernatural beings and events . . .,” ⁴¹ and as fantasy, presents the impossible. The Greek phantasia, meaning “a making visible” connects the role of fantasy to revelation. I use fantasy because it has been engaged with as a device that transforms labor into commodities, as well as its capaciousness for a range of emotional states and interpretations. In tourism, fantasy can “comprise the desires, dreams, and/or magical expectations that tourists imagine.” ⁴² Generally, “[d]estinations strive to create unique experiences intended to fulfill the tourist’s expectations of fantasy.” ⁴³ Key to this definition is the role of expectation. MW’s aesthetic strategies and manipulation of expectation parallels the kind of decisions made in Santa Fe during the development of Pueblo Revivalism within the context of New Mexican exhibition buildings and attractions. While my overall concern is with how the House functions as an imagined environment, and what we are being invited to imagine, I contend that the attraction mirrors the history of Santa Fe’s tourist image secured by its architecture.

Prior to 1912 statehood, New Mexico’s boosters employed a variety of presentation strategies at fairs to promote the region: a shared building with Oklahoma and Arizona for the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition tried neoclassical (proving New Mexico’s ability to Americanize); 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis) tried Mission to showcase New Mexico’s Spanish past. However, the state’s midway attractions were what paid off. Both the 1893 and 1904 exhibits featured what Wilson refers to as “psuedopueblos”—environments made of lathe and plaster where tourists could encounter the so-called “Cliff Dwellers” who happened to be Pueblo artisans from the Laguna or San Ildefonso. The fantasy of encountered difference was a staged event: Indigenous presence was used to establish a sense of authenticity in the displays that “conform[ed] to visitors’ expectations of ‘real’ Indian life.” ⁴⁴

Museum staff had considerable archeological training that attuned them to a visual, material, and environmental sense of northern New Mexico’s past. In 1909, the founding of Museum of New Mexico and the arrival of its director, archeologist Edgar Hewett played an important role in the development of the style. Hewett’s staff comprised of three former students from his 1908 excavation at Frijoles Canyon: Jesse Nusbaum, Kenneth Chapman, and Sylvanus Morley. Their training influenced their aesthetic decisions for the restoration of the Palace of the Governor’s (1909–1912), the 1912 city plan, and the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. Between 1909 and 1915 the museum staff worked closely with architects (notably Isaac Rapp, a successful theater set designer who had landed the commission to design the 1904 St. Louis exhibition), artists, editors, and publishers to refine and promote Santa Fe’s signature style. Slowly, their collaborations blended Spanish and Puebloan features: flat roofs, protruding vigas, portales (archways), and adobe (earthen, sun-fired brick). The success of the previous midway attractions and the archeologically informed vision of the museum staff formalized Pueblo Revivalism. This pairing concretized as the Painted Desert, New Mexico’s contribution to the 1915 Panama-California Exposition (San Diego). ⁴⁵ Sponsored by the Santa Fe railway, the five acre Painted Desert had two psuedopueblos, and again utilized Pueblo artisans to convey the display’s authenticity. A year later, the exhibit’s design reappeared on the Santa Fe Plaza as the Fine Arts Museum.

Pueblo Revivalism became the language of Santa Fe’s tourist image, gaining prominence in large part because boosters no longer felt held back by the city’s “. . . contending identities, the romantic image of the city became the central vehicle for economic resurgence and the blueprint for its physical transformation.” ⁴⁶ Both Pueblo Revival and Mission styles reference a past Hispanic or Indigenous “aesthetic impact on landscape” ⁴⁷ to nourish white touristic expectations and desires to encounter racialized difference. The Mission style had proliferated in California, becoming the dominant style of the imagined Hispanic Southwest celebrated by boosters like Charles Lummis, who also promoted the early adoption of what came to be called Pueblo Revivalism in Santa Fe. ⁴⁸ The Mediterranean inflected style elevated hispanophilic projections of the past—an illusion American journalist Carey McWilliams accurately named as “Spanish Fantasy Heritage.” ⁴⁹ New Mexico’s boosters sought a style that would productively use a local referent and distinguish the region from California. Pueblo Revivalism, despite being a syncretic style that combines Spanish and Puebloan features, conveyed a specifically Indigenous presence as something to be managed and assimilated into the national project.

Pueblo Revival can be fruitfully understood as Pueblo Fantasy Heritage: an imitation vernacular that dominates New Mexico’s tourist image intimately tied to the production of thematized spaces reliant upon symbols, color, material, and texture to create imagery that will satisfy tourist expectation of racialized difference by appearing historically authentic. The popularity of the style has in no way empowered local Hispano, Latinx, or Indigenous communities. Fantasy Heritage styles work to “reassure urban elites that the supposedly unruly [Indigenous] and Mexican populations that have been primarily absorbed via colonization [have been] easily managed and included in modern urban development.” ⁵⁰ Both “heritage” and “revival” are keywords for aesthetic inclusion without consequence that dial audiences’ into the past, temporally displacing the source of that heritage from our current moment or potential future.

Ultimately, Pueblo Revivalism is an aesthetic “colonial solution to the [perceived] ‘problem’” ⁵¹ presented by Latinx and Indigenous populations in U.S. cities. According to Wilson, the post-World War period’s nativism could be seen in the logic that “New Mexico’s architecture was indeed distinctly American . . . because it derived from the indigenous Pueblos and from local Spanish architecture—the country’s oldest colonial tradition.” ⁵² Elevating the Spanish past because of its colonial tradition locates colonialism’s oppression as past events perpetuated by non-U.S. forces, detracting from ongoing coloniality. Pueblo Revivalism provides an architectural proxy for racial and cultural harmony, as the tourist imagery mollifies tensions resulting from waves of colonialism. This imagery has been undisturbed thanks to a 1957 city ordinance that requires conformity to Santa Fe’s “historic” styles, ⁵³ the breadth of which demonstrate Pueblo Revivalism’s elasticity (a feature it shares with the vague “Spanish colonial,” which extends to styles as diverse as Second Empire Baroque and High Victorian Gothic). ⁵⁴ The building that contains the House was once a common example of this city ordinance in action: Silva Lanes featured protruding vigas along its roofline, brown stucco to resemble adobe, one story, a flat roof, portales. Today, the building’s makeover in a bright white coat of paint over its Pueblo Revival ziggurat roofline and portales appears as a break from that image. When MW decorates corridors and rooms with unrecognizable faux alien script on signs, large shop windows with bizarre creatures, bright television screens mimicking showrooms, cramped, busy shopping streets such as markets or bazaars, it reproduces the visual Othering a fantasy of encounter is contingent upon.

Both “Fancy Town” and “Art City” areas graft from the logic of urban planning to organize the space wherein the titular House is the center, and these areas are peripheral. The density of collected installations in “Art City” mimic patterns consistent with what urban planning scholar David R. Diaz characterizes as the principal difference between barrios and suburbs, which he sees as a difference between passive sprawl and intensive uses of space in Latinx neighborhoods. ⁵⁵ Imagined as areas of pathological danger threatening the stability of city life, these outer edges are associated with racialized inhabitants deemed incapable of “proper use.” Use of patterns, different languages, and color become visual signifiers of blight: a racial synonym that obscures the systemic inequity that the urban poor live with. ⁵⁶ Overall, these decorative decisions consciously and unconsciously translate dominant ideas about who (racialized Others) and what is expected to inhabit the imagined chaos of urban enclaves.

Furnishing the House of Eternal Return

To connect each of its worlds, the attraction utilizes the refrigerator, washing machine, and fireplace as gateways. Each of these features supply the attraction with the necessary iconography of domestic comfort to draw on the audience’s knowledge of the built environment as the external setting where our repeated actions produce everyday life’s meaning. The House’s fantasy thrives by offering stimulating environments that depict “ . . . exotic . . . destination[s], [with] . . . unique activities . . . Routine experiences based on familiar realities and interactions are replaced with uncertain outcomes.” ⁵⁷ Familiarity of movement (opening a refrigerator), surroundings (a family home), and quirky characters (the Selig/Pastores) make the story superficially inane, often reflected in the impulse to disregard the entire thing as “immersive schtick.” ⁵⁸ Walking through a refrigerator may be silly, but it does highlight how aesthetic practices materialize affective passageways into our interior lives. The choice to have familiar domestic spaces and common appliances give way to other realms magnifies the stakes of our world’s inequalities: this environment assumes visitors already inhabit a certain quality of life. Stepping through various household appliances makes the entry fee easy to forget and does not carry the seriousness of a conventional art museum which may not appeal to families with young children, while reaffirming the centrality of commodities in domestic life’s comforts. Simultaneously, converting appliances into travel infrastructure playfully enacts everyday flights from daily pressures as best practiced in daydreaming.

The Victorian façade conures up the haunted houses and spooky mansions made popular by gothic tales, horror movies, and mystery adventures, priming visitors to expect that something is not as it seems. Every door in the House (house, refrigerator, washing machine) roots the “otherworldly” experiences in mundane and recognizable floor plans that furnish a “social vision . . . on behalf of the individual and the single-family unit . . . promoting the idea of the private, single-family dwelling as an ideal icon of American life.” ⁵⁹

Upon entering, fantasy provides both the premise for encounter with the unknown (the dragons) and our own role within the story. The logic of the story casts us as protagonists, and our successful dragon hunting is deserving of some reward. As visitors, we must in some way know this family. Are they our neighbors, friends, family members? If we recognize ourselves in this family, about whom we know very little, what do they provide us with? Recall that the multiverse continuously cites itself, centering the domestic environment’s contents. Entering the House instantiates a Nietzschean loop wherein we are “eternally returned” to the family home to live the same life over and over again. These circular routes to the House reinforce the centrality of private property, domestic privacy, class, and racial orders that provide the story of the Selig/Pastore family and their home with the narrative stability required to suspend our disbelief upon entering the physical environment. This narrative decision scripts a fantasy of homeownership that patrons pantomime as they walk through House. Fantasies are essential to understanding our desires, how our imaginations are informed by culture, respond to pressures, or seek comfort. Shaped by their entanglements with political projects and aspirations, fantasies can be liberatory exercises. They can also conform to their source material. In this fantasy, inspiration comes from the rhetorical power of the postwar home as a symbol of U.S. economic prosperity.

Architectural historian Dianne Harris has shown how this prosperity was exclusively for those who could be easily integrated into a comfortable white middle-class, spurred by the postwar economic boom, new access to Fair Housing Act funds, mortgage insurance lending, and by restrictive racial covenants enforced by banks and real estate industry workers. Homeownership was (and remains) a primary site of class and racial signification, a prized status resulting from conditional accessibility wherein the “ability to own a home in the suburbs [became] a sign of belonging to the middle class, and to belong to that class was to be further bleached.” ⁶⁰ The proliferation of this symbol of economic well-being was facilitated by popular trade and design magazines that instructed consumers about taste, propriety, and values tied to “hygienic” modes of consumption. In other words, the postwar house’s rhetorical power circulated in and out of the home in the form of consumer habits, appliances, exterior and interior design (fences, shelving) that hid evidence of household labor, stressed domestic privacy, and dictated a rightful place for anyone and anything. These ideals were always bound in maintaining white environments as proxies for patriotic neighborhoods, thus spatializing white, patriarchal cultural values about what American citizens looked like, where, and how they lived—the House embodies these values. We can read MW’s House as a model home that mines the postwar house to source a model family.

The House usefully cues us into thinking about class as a status of accumulated assets, the Selig/Pastore family help us think critically about the family as a unit that accumulates assets as a means of reproducing class allegiances. While concepts like individual freedom are not blatantly announced in the attraction, they do lie at the core of the fictional family’s attributes: creativity is an asset they possess in such overwhelming quantities that it affords them the ability to exist outside of the laws of physics. Sociologist Melinda Cooper describes the Fordist family as representing

economic security [in] the postwar era . . . premised on a tightly enforced sexual division of labor that relegated women to lower-paid, precarious forms of employment and indexed the wage of the Fordist worker to the costs of maintaining a wife and children at home. ⁶¹

Cooper’s description draws out relationships between family members and labor that are eerily recognizable across most family-focused media including the House: the normatively attractive family is cast as a white hetero couple, their young daughter and son, an uncle, and traces of grandparents. Dad (“Nicolae Pastore”) looks like what we would call a tech-bro: he’s a white guy in Patagonia who is some sort of scientist. Mom (“Piper Selig”) is an artist (precarious employment, as most MW workers can attest). A montage of home video chronicling the couple’s lives plays on the living room TV across from a small sofa, the coffee table covered in material pertaining to Mom’s brother (“Lucius Selig”), a failed cult leader who exists to proselytize a spiritual pseudoscience called “positive mechanics” and may be responsible for the entire multiverse’s existence.

As a magical family, the Selig/Pastores represent a host of aspirational tropes. Artist, scientist, inventor, dreamer, cult leader, each family member is a fabricator of some kind. The fictional family’s eclecticism is intended to inspire comparison or admiration for them and their “forma de ser” (way of being), affects, and values. The actual solution to the puzzle is secondary to participating in the search, which is what generates an investment in the storyline. Another trick of the attraction’s narrative fantasy is that the physical transformation of the everyday into the unexpected obscures how these environments restage a plot that works to validate a status quo. Under neoliberal austerity, individuals must work at all costs to protect normative patriarchal family structures because the private family is the “. . . primary source of economic security and a comprehensive alternative to the welfare state.” ⁶² Within the representational field of the Fordist family and postwar house as symbols of economic prosperity, homeownership further indexes how white middle-class stability is maintained through inheritance, a “. . . form of intergenerational, parental investment, where the family becomes the primary source of economic welfare for those born into a world of ever-diminishing goods.” ⁶³ Tellingly, both fictional and real children are left to wander the multiverse ad infinitum. Whatever radical potential found in daydreams is thwarted in MW’s artistic offering. Rather than a portal to new ways of being, it is a funhouse mirror reflecting the order of things as they already are that visually and internally undermine the very concept of their “otherworldly” experience. This fantasy is extended in Portals Bermuda, fusing tourism and spirituality via affective whiteness on the other side of the refrigerator.

Enlisting the refrigerator, MW’s narrative choice “chart[s a spiritual and material] future through a process of triangulation involving housing, consumer durables, and—crucially—the model family. ⁶⁴ ” Portals Bermuda is presented as “the #1 interdimensional vacation resort for the spiritually aware.” A circular room conforming to science fiction’s most basic design motifs (advanced technology, stark interiors) features a center console. The console projects an uncanny reflection of hospitality work, a pearl skinned woman, uniformed like a flight or cruise attendant named Alva and touchscreen with selection options. Multiple doorways lead to a hallway featuring the distinct destinations Alva introduces. Portals Bermuda is tasked with orienting and extending the narrative, a transitional space anchoring the main plot line that facilitates that plot’s development. ⁶⁵ Portals’ promise of spiritual vacation resuscitates the twentieth century’s romantic Southwest as a “New World whose terrain, climate and indigenous peoples offered a model of ecological, spiritual and artistic integration to an alienated and decadent Western civilization.” ⁶⁶ “Bermuda” summons the possibility that you may very well be lost to space and time, adrift somewhere betwixt the North Atlantic and the Tropic of Cancer. “Bermuda” also exploits associations between luxury and the tropical as a setting for white leisure: a far-off place where anonymous tanned staff supply vibrantly colored drinks with umbrella toothpicks. Portals is the only anchor space explicitly intimated within the main house. Brochures in the living room depict a ball of light in the center of the page, a beam of red flowing from the orb, against a starry sky upon a human silhouette looking up at the orb. The top of the brochure reads “ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A BETTER PARADIGM? Find Yours Today with Master Lucius Selig’s The Power of Positive Mechanics.” Between sky and man is listed a series of promises this inter-dimensional vacation resort can deliver: “UNLOCK YOUR INNATE DIVINITY/ JOURNEY TO YOUR SPIRIT HOME/ ACHIEVE ANYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE/ POWER ON TO THE GREATEST ADVENTURE OF YOUR LIFE.” The mixture of tourism (journey, greatest adventure) and spiritually coded motivational rhetoric (unlock your innate divinity, spirit home, achieve anything you can imagine, power on) produces the language of a moral economy.

Writing on racial and class privilege among elite parents in Brazil and Puerto Rico, anthropologist Ana Ramos-Zayas identifies how wealthy parents created and cultivated moral economies based on anticonsumption, antimaterialism, and self-improvement that served as a basis for their entrenchment in neoliberal policies via their personal justifications of inequality and political support of governmental austerity. In turn, this moral economy actively shaped their physical surroundings, marked by an investment in greater surveillance and racial and economic segregation. Ramos-Zayas refers to the “affective practices and structures of feeling” these parents deploy. Through these practices, urban elites’ “[sociabilities and national affects] provided moral justifications for inequality that complement US political, financial, and military hemispheric interventions.” ⁶⁷ By interfacing with Alva, Portals Bermuda circulates a presumably accessible affective structure of spiritual enlightenment, or what Ramos-Zayas identifies as an interiority of whiteness. ⁶⁸ For Ramos- Zayas, this affective practice of elite urban parents in Brazil and Puerto Rico functioned as a racial synonym. By showing their spiritual enlightenment and investment in wellness (yoga, diet, Buddhism), antimaterialism (minimalist décor), and abstract support for their own self-realization (self-help seminars), these parents cultivated an interiority that parlayed whiteness into their everyday practices. Further, this affective whiteness corresponded to how they excused inequality, espousing neoliberal politics that rendered them “good citizens” as opposed to the “unmotivated” and “materialistic” (non-white) masses on the fringes of the nation-state. Not of this world, Alva meets us at a purported gateway, the guardian of boundaries between worlds whose mindless hospitality is a repetitive empty gesture of superficial inclusion scripted by the House that helps manage the masses. Ceaselessly welcoming strangers, Alva’s image is pure constructed projection, she exists only to be read: her glimmer reveals and warns everything about her placement and presentation. ⁶⁹ Alva pantomimes real estate agents, bankers, and other brokers who have power and influence over human decisions that shape landscapes, often at their own whim. ⁷⁰ Alva the “hospitality bot” guides visitors in this fantasy of inclusion. Curiously, Alva is not presented as an android, despite the definitional requirement of having human form. All pixels, a computer program with one endless repetitive task, Alva as bot strips her down to command: her hospitable programming (eternal serving and pleasing) rips the mask off the gendered drudgery of the House. Reading Alva through enchantment, encountering her presence is both Other and non-threatening, again satisfying tourist expectations of difference.

Conclusion

What makes MW vulnerable to only being understood as “schtick,” beyond the artistic, material, and financial requirements of large-scale sculptural work, is what made MW attractive to the city to begin with. A new way of doing what Santa Fe has done for at least a century, MW offered a way to attract tourists to experience difference. For my own part, I appreciate the cheekiness of drawing tourists to a place where they again play out being a tourist in other dimensions. While it is not the most affordable attraction, MW has half a million visitors annually, slightly more than the nearby Georgia O’Keeffe Museum ⁷¹ ($20 at the door). General admission prices to MW ring in at $30 for NM residents ($23/ages 5–13), $40 for non-residents ages fourteen+, and $35 for non-resident children. ⁷² Santa Fe’s public realm is increasingly understood as a resource for an audience structured as white, willing to enact the “sets of practices . . . wherein w]hiteness [is made] invisible but at the same time organizationally central to the construction of art and romantic representations of New Mexican society as ethnic and exotic for the purpose of promoting . . . tourism.” ⁷³ These practices are inherent to the enchantment industry’s “tourism in search of ethnically exotic others” ⁷⁴ which aestheticize the settler need for more land, an integral facet of settler colonialism made evident in the region’s increased cost of living. ⁷⁵ 2020 Census data recorded 18.2 percent of NM residents living under the federal poverty line, with average wages stagnating at $17/hour. Median household income in NM is $51,945, putting the state 20 percent behind the national average. ⁷⁶ While MW offers employees free admission to all its permanent attractions, the wages for workers in creative positions at the company range toward some of the lowest for Santa Fe. According to workplace transparency site Glassdoor, the average median annual wage for a MW worker involved in designing, fabricating, and maintaining the House is only slightly above the state average in one of the state’s most expensive cities. ⁷⁷

MW is a part of the contemporary enchantment industry. As the posterchild for contemporary Santa Fe’s artistic innovation, MW models how artists can create sustainable work attractive to cities, and in turn, how cities can support artists. As another venue for the city’s ethnic tourism, albeit disguised, MW uncomfortably furthers a mass culture of whiteness. None of the original members or actual practicing artists run the company. Consistent layoffs curtail the company’s largest success: stable work for artists. Public art and fun are unquestionably social goods, yet we seem to be willing to compromise the radical potential of such forms to attain access to them. If artists were at the helm, what would MW look like? What if instead of an explosion of merchandise to satisfy patent requirements for funding, cities considered the number of exhibitions that respond to local contexts, training for artists in the neighborhood, affordable enrichment programs for local children, bilingual programming, or creative workshops? Potential answers lie in the sustained efforts and support of the artists organizing as workers with protection, but they also depend on what the public is willing to imagine of our shared, fantastic, urban imagination.

Describing MW as colonial echoes the level of public distrust with the city redirected at MW. However, I find it more accurate to say that MW goes to great lengths to be read as apolitical. While I recognize that such a designation is itself a political choice, here, I use it to describe the deliberate attempts to make something seem as if it is free from political choices or outcomes but ultimately supports a status quo. The choices for the storyline, contextualized with the reality of Santa Fe, and New Mexico in general, perpetuate the growing representative dominance of Anglo-Americans in the city since the 1990s. ⁷⁸ New Mexico’s idea of enchantment presents encounters but does not disrupt the hierarchies. If MW were transparently colonial, it would risk exposing what enchantment veils. Each realm of the multiverse works to maintain normative spatial relationships between class, race, and place. The Selig/Pastore home is the narrative anchor that sets the foundation for the rest of the attraction to dress up the familiar as exotic. The attraction tries to sell itself as an expansive utopia but fails to imagine a world without a Fordist family or where workers have collective bargaining rights. MW feeds the commercial appetite of state officials precisely because such a development project superficially satisfies a desire for diversity without creating a landscape that disrupts center-periphery relationships or workplace hierarchies. As of August 2024, MW’s expansion into two Texas locations, a notoriously Right-to-Work state, should be seen as another intentional choice given the company’s hostility toward the Worker’s Collective’s union efforts leading up to the ratification of their first contract in 2022. The House strives to promote itself as a unique and singular experience. This tension between appearances or intentions and actual working conditions bubbles within new installations and locations.

At their flagship attraction, patrons can now see two new permanent exhibits by artists of color. Lauren YS, an LA-based muralist known for themes related to queer and Asian futurity, created an interactive puzzle named “The Ancestor’s Crypt.” Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz’s “Sirens: Secret Passkeys and Portals” depicts a dystopian future with time-travelers seeking to aid their ancestors during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The fact that these developments come on the heels of more vocal critiques of MW’s attractions as colonial are necessary correctives if MW is going to stay true to a mission of diverse representation and indicate a good faith attempt to respond accordingly to public criticism. Unconnected to the narrative of the HoER, the inclusions are alienated from the overall experience and neither installation alters the HoER’s principal fantasy. Latinx Studies scholar Johana Londoño has written about how strategies of representation in public spaces do not always indicate a meaningful inclusion and can foster a public representation of ideal neoliberal citizenship that “would not challenge gentrification and its process of capital accumulation.” ⁷⁹ In her analysis of parks dedicated to Latinx historical figures, Londoño notes how naming the park after Latin American revolutionary or cultural figures privileged the past over the present and Latin America over Latinx living in the United States. In turn, these spaces detract from the marginalization and invisibility of living Latinx. The “[c]ommemorations [exemplified] the city’s need to control and model the best representation of Latinx people and culture in public space.” ⁸⁰ Similarly, and as I have argued here, Santa Fe is dominated by its own tourist imagery and built environment that temporally displaces the Indigenous, Hispano, and Mexican American source of its aesthetic heritage from our current moment or potential future. Inside the House, the “Ancestral Crypt” and “Sirens” are explicitly scripted in a time outside of the present, like memorialized Latinxs in parks examined by Londoño. Likewise, the two installations can introduce an interesting challenge to conceptions of linear time: if the past (the ancestral) and the future coexist simultaneously, when do we decide what shapes our present?

As explored in the previous sections, MW’s multiverse representationally and spatially reinforces dominant categories of place, movement, and even top-down labor. The environment that serves as the primary narrative world displays how enchantment works first as a fantasy of encounter within the familiar. Secondly, this fantasy is achieved by centering the connections between property and the nuclear family for the entire multiverse’s narrative stability, extended by Portals Bermuda’s white affect. The fantasies credited with establishing the House’s magnetism ventriloquize Walt Disney’s desire not to change people’s lives, merely their surroundings. ⁸¹ The comfort of the House is that fundamentally, there is nothing about it that inspires any sort of reflection or desire for change. MW’s influence may not be readily accepted by the blue-chip art world, but it is without a doubt that the company will continue to grow and exert more than just an aesthetic sensibility. Attracting thousands of visitors and expanding its reach, MW is poised to export its visions of the world as it is. Or, to paraphrase Kadlubek: unique locations with replicated experiences.