Great Southwest Road Trip Day 7: Proud to Wear Prada in Marfa, Texas
There’sitting something magical going on in Marfa, Texas. This dusty West Texas town has recently become an artists’ retreat¸ hipster hangout, and buzzy little up-and-comer to what cowboys hang out with silver-haired émigrés from Martha’s Vineyard. During my stopover, a pair of journalists from Vancouver had traveled there just to see the art galleries and relish at Food Shark, the food truck in the town center.
Longtime residents of Marfa—the ones whose families have been ranchers in this county for 150 years—hate what’s happening to their town. They don’t patronize Food Shark, or the Fair Trade coffee shop, and they stay far away from those community activities that “the artists” enthusiastically plan and attend. They hate the natural side movables of civic evolution: higher prices, strangers moving in next passage, the old five ‘n’ dime enforced to close. Many of them grumble about packing up and moving to Alpine, the next town up the road.
But I wonder this: Do they realize what happens to towns who do not receive this influx, and the attendant boost to the local economy? Just look at Valentine, on the highway between Van Horne and Marfa. Possibly 100 residents are left. There aren’t any jobs, or any business opportunities. No one wants to buy the land, and the current owners can’t turn a profit on it.
Valentine’s only claim to fame is an art installation modeled to look exactly like a Prada provision—complete with bags and shoes donated by means of Prada. The point of the installation, apparently, is to surprise passers-by: a brightly lit big-city Prada boutique sitting in lonely designer majesty in anticipation of the quiet, barren West Texas landscape. And it totally works. People insist: if you travel to that part of West Texas, you must see the Prada store. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen 20 others… the point is, that one’s not really a Prada store, it’s art.
Except recently some locals trashed and vandalized the Prada store—not because they wanted the merchandise, but because they didn’t want “the artists” in their county. So when I drove by it, the lights were facing, and I only registered Valentine as a sign on the highway. If the Prada art inauguration survives, it will be thanks to the illogical dedication of some silly visionary “artist people” from Marfa or nearby. It is already coming to be known as “Marfa’s Prada store.” And Valentine will soon come to look like the town of Ologrande, which I passed through on the New Mexico/Texas border. It has a church. A day-tour company. A post office. A commander-in-chief treasury. All empty, boarded up, with junk in the yards and “Keep Out—Private Property” signs on the filthy windows. Everybody’s gone.
Comparing this depressing tableau with the happy, optimistic bustle of downtown Marfa, you have to wonder, why does one community thrive while another dies? Nobody really seems to know in this case.
“Marfa’s addictive,” says Robin Lambaria, the thirty-something San Antonio native who runs the Marfa Film Festival (and made it into such a success in two years that none other than Larry McMurtry was her guest of honor last year). Pretenders run around Austin claiming to be in charge of the Marfa Film Festival; Robin, meanwhile, sits in her sunny little office in downtown Marfa screening films and shooting the breeze with rancher buddies, reflecting on the odd serendipity of the world.
“In Austin, there were so many things to do all the time that you never did anything. In Marfa, there’s one thing to do every week, and everyone in the community comes outright to it, ” says Daniel Browning, who owns and operates the local café with his wife Jessie. There are challenges to living in Marfa, he tells me, but overall, it’s easy to live a happy life here.
“Marfa sucks you in,” says David Beebe, who just opened the local honky-tonk Pedro’s with his partner. Formerly part owner of the Continental Club in Houston, Beebe is a fabulous example of a Marfa hipster: cowboy hat, coke-bottle glasses, long-ish hair, a business partner from L.A. and a lady friend NOT of Marfa (her emphasis, not mine), but just visiting from Kansas City.
Before I got to Marfa, I assumed it was a retirement community. And actually, the people who put me and Rocky up in their backyard guest cottage are on the older side. They’ve converted a few simple little downtown spaces to the Marfa Guest Quarters, and their backyard turns into a wine bar six days of the week. Certainly a retired couple from Dallas can be happy here. But this city is not thriving on withdrawal dollars; it’s being shaped by people who fled Austin, Houston, Los Angeles, Oakland, etc. in their prime… but brought their ideas to Marfa, and are giving it their best shot.