Driving around Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up, you see “Breaking Bad” pilgrims everywhere. They descend from tour buses and trolleys to snap pictures of Walter White’s house and, possibly, to toss a pizza on the roof (for an extra fee). They visit the city in search of Jesse Pinkman’s R.V. and the wide, cinematic landscapes from the show. Debbie Ball, a local confectioner known as the Candy Lady, who has a shop of the same name, has made a small fortune selling dime bags of blue rock candy meant to evoke Heisenberg’s meth formulation. “They just don’t stop coming,” she told me. “Suddenly, they’re all here.” It took a long time to get people to Albuquerque—but not for locals’ lack of trying.
One hundred and fifty years before Walter White, another would-be empire builder, Franz Huning, set down roots in Albuquerque and erected a squat terra-cotta fortress called La Glorieta, now the city’s oldest standing residence. Huning, a general-store magnate, bought seven hundred acres from Franciscan friars during the Civil War and set about building his dream house, a sprawling adobe hacienda, under the open sky. Passing through town in 1885 on an extended break from Boston, the Harper’s reporter Sylvester Baxter found himself enchanted by the estate; the resulting article he wrote presented New Mexico, then just a lowly territory, as a travel destination. “The gardens along the Rio Grande strike unspeakably joyous notes of color,” he wrote. “I had no idea there could be so much character to the humble adobe!” Much of the literature about New Mexico is about having no idea what it is actually like.
New Mexico wouldn’t see another booster so zealous until Huning’s granddaughter Erna Fergusson, an adventuress in linen pants who was raised between La Glorieta’s mud walls and the society circles of Washington, and who studied history at Columbia University before returning to New Mexico in 1913, on the heels of statehood. Fergusson put on a Stetson hat and a concho belt and immersed herself in the secret kiva dances of Pueblo cultures. She launched a side business showcasing Native American life to those who passed through the region, sometimes against their will. “When the war ended I began to dude wrangle,” she wrote in a memoir. “I dragged tourists all over New Mexico … to see Indians and Indian Ceremonials. They blamed me bitterly for almost everything, but some of them liked it and came again.” She served travellers iced cantaloupe in overheated rancho houses and told them that her Hopi name was Shikya-wa-nim—Beautiful Swift Fox. (She claimed to be a very fast runner.)
In the late nineteen-twenties, Alfred Knopf, on a hunch, contracted Fergusson to write “Dancing Gods,” a guide to indigenous rituals that became a slight national phenomenon. The rest of the country, as it turned out, was also magnetically drawn to the alien rock piles rising from vastness, and to native peoples who danced around flames. They, too, had no idea. Early on, New Mexico’s allure was its exoticism, a patch of America that didn’t feel American. It was wild, distant, dusty, unruly, potentially pagan, polyglot, a frontier on the very edge of society. An 1871 Times editorial that staunchly argued against statehood said the territory was “the heart of our worst civilization”—a theme that Walter White would later fully embody.
Growing up in New Mexico—I was brought up first on the border of the Navajo reservation in rural Gallup, to the west, and then at the foot of the Sandia tramway in Albuquerque—it’s easy to feel that you live on the margins of the country’s consciousness. We New Mexicans are, in many ways, car-bound consumers crawling over the landscape and its resources like other Americans, with the strip malls and Super Walmarts and S.U.V.s to prove it. And yet the state is a flurry of contrasts; the impoverished schools on the reservations struggle while bright scientific minds arrive in Los Alamos to split atoms. The sunsets are rosy, or blood orange, or sometimes a shocking lavender; the night is pitch black, punctuated only by Cassiopeia. This palpable strangeness, the juxtaposition of extreme mountainous beauty with a noir, dull flatness, is always the big surprise to newcomers. Upon arriving in Taos, all Georgia O’Keeffe could think to say was, “Well, well well … no one told me it was like this.”
And now, our strange land has again captured foreign imaginations, an audience from the outside. In the five years since New Mexico’s clever tax code helped bring “Breaking Bad” to Albuquerque instead of its original conceived location of Riverside, California, the show has sparked a global interest in the city. Earlier this year, New Mexico’s governor, Susana Martinez, passed the “Breaking Bad” bill, which insures that future film and television productions get the same hefty rebate that lured AMC. New Mexico now hopes to become a satellite Hollywood—a dream that, if successful, would help lift the state from poverty (it’s currently the eighth poorest in the U.S.) and shift it from cultural isolation to full saturation. New Mexico may soon become the backdrop for a large chunk of our entertainment, beginning the process that nudged Hollywood from a rural industry town into a metropolis where no corner has been left unfilmed.
Since the show began, I have not had a conversation with a new person about my home town that did not involve some question about Heisenberg or blue meth. People want to know if that’s really what it is like there, if I know any addicts (I don’t), if I’ve ever seen a lab (I haven’t). They want to know if I have been to that car wash and Taco Sals (I have). They want to know, just as armchair travellers in 1931 wanted to know, about sword-swallowing dancers.
Many people have asked me if I think “Breaking Bad” shines a “bad light” on the state. I don’t. And, often, the unabashed love of Walt and co. by locals (citywide events, themed microbrews, Heisenberg hat manufacturers) is puzzling to outsiders. The show is a fable about seediness and monstrosity and a city ravaged by drug trouble. Baltimore isn’t exactly putting up billboards about “The Wire.” (But we are!) I try to explain that New Mexicans are proud of anything that draws us out of neglect, out of never really fitting in. We are just happy to be considered, even if it is for our underbelly.
Perhaps it’s also because we realize there is no sense in hiding our dark side, which is so deep a part of living in a state that has been dismissed and economically hobbled from the start. (We tried to become a state for more than fifty years; no one wanted us; we offered to change the state name to Lincoln; they still didn’t.) Living in Albuquerque, at least in recent decades, means accepting a constant low-level fear of violent crime. When I was in grade school, the infamous Hollywood Video murders—a triple homicide—happened at a video store down the street from my house. The same year, the stabbing of a young girl as part of a teen-age dare shut down our local amusement park. We were warned not to venture into the “war zone,” a cluster of blocks along the once glamorous but now abandoned Route 66 where drug feuds often broke out. We got lectures in school on what colors not to wear to avoid conflict, and how not to get caught in the crossfire of initiation rituals. An entire string of kitschy motels in the southeast sector of the city have become permanent junkie enclaves; the dilapidated Fair ‘N’ Square supermarket has become a needle exchange. This year, in April, a man ran into a church during Sunday service and stabbed members of the choir. In Albuquerque, that event came as a shock to few.
“Breaking Bad” is the first story to truly commit the full spectrum of New Mexico to film: the grandiose vistas, the soaring altitudes, the banal office complexes, the Kokopellis and Kachina dolls, the seamy warehouses, the marshmallow clouds. The show seems to root itself deeper in the landscape with every new montage. It has become our newest monument.
On television, Albuquerque still looks like the Wild West, a scorched, hazy, lawless place where rugged individualism might just tip over into criminal behavior at any moment—it’s not wholly inaccurate. “Breaking Bad,” for all its extreme tensions and plot twists, is a show organically tied to its shooting location. Vince Gilligan, in speaking with Charlie Rose about relocating the show to Albuquerque, said that he could not possibly imagine the story without it, that all of the action spawned from the “postmodern Western” spirit of the land. The isolated oddness of the Southwest dictates Walt’s transformation into a one-man axis of evil as much as anything else; the possibilities for empire can feel endless when the sky goes on forever. Standing on a mesa with sand stretching in all directions is so surreal as to make one feel invincible. In a new promo for the show, Bryan Cranston recites “Ozymandias,” Shelley’s paean to the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II and his tragic ambition in an ancient land. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.” The desert has a way of breeding conquistadors and then committing them back to the dust.
When I spoke with Ball, the Candy Lady, about the influx of interest in the state’s more sordid affairs, she told me that she doesn’t see a downside to it. She also told me that last year, just as her sugary narcotics made national news, her daughter-in-law died from a meth overdose. The reality of her life and that of the show are constantly in collision, in a way that might make other people turn away and look forward to its end. But she doesn’t want “Breaking Bad” to be over. She’ll keep selling blue rocks as long as the people arrive. “The whole world can see Albuquerque now,” she says. “They see us with all our problems. We’re not shy about it, just as I’m not shy about mine. But the people … they also see the sky. They never knew! I get so many travellers who tell me they can’t believe this place. They can’t believe this has been a part of their country, this whole time.”
Illustration by Maximilian Bode