A Requiem for Authenticity - Lindsey's (last!) Post

When friends come to visit Tucson, I make a mental checklist of places we must go. As a girl born and raised in the Old Pueblo, I feel I have my finger on the pulse of what it means to be authentically Tucsonan, and to demonstrate what this elusive concept means to those who are here for a short time, I take them to the usual places: The Mexican restaurants on south 6^th along with the Food City there that sells, among fresh tortillas and churros, the plaster statues of the Virgin. I take them to the dive bars that feel seedy enough to give them a taste of ‘real’ Tucson (avoiding the U of A haunts, the locales of transitory populations who go for the thirsty Thursday specials and not the authentic vibe of a dive). And of course, I take them to the desert – what can arguably be the absolute truth of what it means to be a Tucsonan – to scrape bare legs against mesquite shrubs and deftly avoid the pincushion cacti. When I think about these declarations of my place based authenticity in light of this week’s readings, declarations that I have performed more times than I can count (after all, people love coming to visit Tucson in the winter months), I recognize my experience is a true Tucson experience because it is mine. But does this mean it is the real one?

In essence, the question I ask is one we have been grappling with throughout the course of the semester. Is it ever possible to truly grasp a real, true authentic experience? Or, phrased another way, can authenticity belong to a group (ethnicity, culture, class, community, individual) without it just as easily co-opted by another? Sometimes, when I am sitting at the taqueria pico de gallo with my friends visiting from San Francisco or New York, having declared their carne seca tacos the best in town, I feel like I am a fraud, that I am taking someone else’s actual true experience (the shop owner, the people of South Tucson) and making it my own. But is the fact that I frequent there enough to not feel this existential guilt that comes when wrestling with authenticity? I’m not quite sure. It seems, after reading many authors’ takes on the concept of identity and authenticity throughout the term, struggling with what it means to be folk, we are left at a theoretical and practical impasse (which is, in my opinion, the mark of a good graduate level course).

Maybe, as this term comes to an end, I can settle on a dialectical notion of authenticity. By dialectic, I mean that there is neither one definition nor one constitution of what it means to be a member of a group or of a place. In my years of making my own version of Tucson-ness, I have created a meaning of what this town is, and through the act of creating this meaning it continues to re-create itself. Perhaps it becomes useful to imagine myself as a point of intersection through which signs and signifiers pass – the full belly after a Sonoran hot dog, the sound of a quail calling to its young on a desert trail – and though I am but one intersecting point, I am the only point I can truly understand. This all sounds very partial and rather influenced by the deep ecology movement or David Harvey, but a concrete conception of authenticity or identity seems not only problematic, but rather besides the point. Whether I aim to create a real ‘Tucson’ that I belong to or assert my identity in any other way (grad student, wife, mother of a dog who looks like a muppet), I can only do so recognizing the fact that my very assertions continue to reshape the meaning of these things themselves. Authenticity is co-constitutive, made up of one’s own personal experience and the broader societal factors that allow one to experience something in a certain way in the first place. Music can be the deciding factor for an individual’s identity formation, as can knowing the streets of the place you call home. But in this process of one’s own identity formation, there lies an always evolving, always dialectic sense of authenticity – an identity that is inherently partial, but uniquely your own.