ALONG THE WAY

Kidnapped by Corporate America, Saguaros Show Up in the Darndest Places

The first person to answer the phone at Old El Paso didn't know what a saguaro was. She pronounced it “sog-ware-o” and made me spell it twice. And then my inquiry vanished into a corporate black hole. It was eight days before someone called back. My question: Why does the label on Old El Paso enchilada sauce have drawings of saguaros on it? I lived in El Paso for 17 years, and a saguaro would no sooner grow there than in San Francisco. El Paso resides in the high Chihuahuan Desert, and the winters are way too cold for the signature cactus of the lower Sonoran Desert.

The eventual answer came from Minneapolis, the home of Pillsbury, Old El Paso's corporate parent. Jackie Peterson of the Product Communications Department explained, “It isn't intended to be a correct representation of the cactus indigenous to the El Paso area. It's a cactus easily recognized by consumers.” That it is. It's so easily recognized, in fact, that it's been hijacked from its rightful owner Arizona and employed as a kind of universal symbol, or icon, of the American West. And not, in my opinion, with consistently good taste.

A medical thriller written in Massachusetts and edited in New York featured an episode in which the good guy escapes from a secret prison compound in southern Utah. To survive, he kicks over a convenient saguaro and gnaws the pulp for liquid refreshment. So many things wrong here. Wrong state, wrong desert, wrong species of cactus. And no Southwestern writer would have his protagonist survive at the expense of a saguaro. I stayed at a motel in Gallup, New Mexico, that had an atrium with a couple of good-size saguaros on display, apparently to evoke the general idea of “desert.” But again, wrong desert. Northern New Mexico and southern Arizona are not even botanical cousins.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I found a shop selling Texas T-shirts bristling with saguaros. A motel sign in El Cajon, California, used the anthropomorphic saguaro-asrobbery-victim, its arms upraised in surrender. And occasionally the saguaro has been kidnapped even without crossing state lines. When the classic Jimmy Stewart Western Broken Arrow was filmed in the red rock country around Sedona in 1951, plaster-ofParis saguaros were scattered around the landscape lest anyone miss the other evidence of “Arizona.” Saguaros would no sooner grow around Sedona than in El Paso.

But we have always needed icons to represent and explain the West. Ever since the railroad began opening it to mass tourism and settlement in the 1880s, Americans from other places have gravitated to romanticized images to try to comprehend the place. The real West, with its ancient Indian cultures, otherworldly landscapes, and unbelievable distances, has always been a place that defies easy understanding. Cartoon images help explain it, dissipate its wildness.

Old El Paso's saguaros, Taco Bell's Mission Revival architecture, and all those Kokopelli earrings and wind chimes are all trying to do the same thing: sell the West as a gentle, friendly place with just a whiff of exoticism.

And the saguaro is certainly a friendly image. Some years ago, Warren Anderson, a University of Arizona art professor who had a lifelong interest in the iconography of the West, had his beginning students sketch saguaros from memory. Almost every one drew the same thing: a short, plump cactus with two arms upraised a comical, humanesque image. During the 1950s and '60s, Arizona Republic editorial cartoonist Reg Manning, who won a Pulitzer Prize, always signed his prickly cartoons with a grinning or scowling saguaro. It signaled that his intention, at heart, was more benign than malicious. There is something not only amusing but also comforting in the image of a plant that looks like a cartoon human. It suggests a welcome, and then maybe on a subliminal level the kinship of all life. It so happens that Arizona's signature Cereus giganteus is the only plant in North America that can do all this.

So perhaps Arizona, a friendly place, should be generous in lending its symbol around. Old El Paso/Pillsbury, however, should in return send its enchilada sauce chef to Tucson for conditioning. The sauce tastes pretty good, but it needs to be much hotter and bolder if it's going to carry the Arizona flag.