<< Back
Glengarry Glen Ross and Rio Rancho
In 1969, David Mamet was a fresh college graduate returned to his native Chicago
while he pondered his next move. For a year, he worked in an office out near O'Hare
Airport where a group of testosterone-fueled salesmen pitched "worthless land in Florida
and Arizona to the elderly and ill." Their technique was to run powerful radio,
television, and newspaper ads, collect indications of interest ("leads"), and launch
high-pressure phone conversations and personal visits ("sits").
Working as an office manager, Mamet "treasured" the experience of watching "the most
driven guys I've ever met." He wrote later, "I assure you that as bizarre as the
behavior in the play might seem, the behavior in the office itself made it look tame."
These guys were "a force of nature." They "could sell cancer."
One of the properties these "performers" pitched, which by the time of the play had
become legendary, was Rio Rancho. To Mamet and the salesmen, "Rio Rancho" was never
more than another scam, just another bit of desert or swamp wrapped in linguistic
flim-flam like "River Glen" or "Mountain View" or "Glen Ross Farms." To New Mexicans,
even back in 1983-84 when the play appeared, the situation was more complex.
"Scam"? In two-page print ads of the 1960s, AMREP Corporation (later AMREP Southwest)
lied brazenly about the land it was offering. True or false? "The gently rolling
land is so fertile it awaits only your touch to produce luscious fruits and
vegetables—exotic floral gardens ablaze with beauty." True or false? "Only
5 Minutes from Metropolitan Albuquerque!" True or false? Rio Rancho was "the Booming
'Wonder City' of the Great Southwest!" And if the development was slowly expanding
around a close-in nucleus—the first model home went up in 1962 and the Ed Parkers
from New York City occupied the first house a year later— most of the suckers who
paid $800 for half acres and $1500 for full acres ("Only $1 Down, $10 Monthly!") were
buying lots way out on the margins of the huge development, land that stood no likelihood
of infrastructure for decades.
Trouble ensued. In 1975 a New York court convicted AMREP of mail fraud to the
tune of $200 million. Three years later, after the US Supreme Court upheld that
conviction, four corporate officers were sentenced to prison terms and fines.
In 1979, the Federal Trade Commission charged AMREP with unsavory practices, and
a new New York case, this one a class action suit, was settled when AMREP promised
to provide $350,000 in community improvements. With felony convictions on its
executive officers' rap sheets, AMREP could not buy a liquor license for its country club.
The local perspective, even if we brush away the Chamber of Commerce rhetoric, was
always more fine-grained. Some of the sales campaign's trumpet blasts were true enough.
Albuquerque's population had indeed experienced a "700% increase in past 30 years!"
giving optimistic locals reason to expect a metropolitan total of one million by 1975.
And Rio Rancho experienced steady population growth, from 550 in 1966 to 5377 in 1974.
By 1970, the development boasted a golf club, 24 social organizations, and a sewage
treatment plant fit for a city of 20,000. A steady influx of easterners (whom many New
Mexicans incorrectly believed to be Jews) were joined by New Mexicans and other
westerners who soon became 20% of the population. In 1981, the city of 10,000
souls was incorporated. Within four years, that number had doubled. Then Intel
arrived. The 2000 census put the population at 51,000. The local powers built an
arena and convinced UNM and CNM to set up shop in the sagebrush. Today's population
estimates hover around 75,000. Those of us in theatre know that the city sends us a
large number of spectators, whom we welcome with wide-open arms.
So what was the reality of the City of Vision? Scam, legit development, or both?
To Mamet, Rio Rancho was simply part of what happened in the Chicago office,
where he observed the most animalistic aspects of capitalism. As "Teacher"
Cole says in American Buffalo, capitalism means that a man is free "To Embark
on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit" in order to "secure his honest chance to make a profit."
Sound familiar?
—David Richard Jones
<< Back
