This study critically reexamines the origins and operations of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona. It began modestly in the 1950s as a local operation to educate visitors about the Sonoran Desert. In the midst of Arizona's recent explosive economic growth, however; the desert museum has evolved into an internationally celebrated spectacle devoted to Disneyfied renditions of the Southwestern deserts. Its displays in Baudrillardian terms are increasingly hyperreal, or generating models of an imagineered reality without original referents, which become a set of processed secondhand truths about the now overdeveloped desert Southwest. Although this institution began with a preservationist ethic, and does still have some potential as a corrective device, it has become today a more negative presence, working ideologically to anchor real estate development, suburban consumerism, and industrial growth.
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