o create a place myth that would reconfigure the town as the epit-ome of American development and modernization along the international bor-der between New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico. Their endeavors to construct this place myth illustrate the ways in which elite actors intended to recreate the Columbus area as a space firmly controlled by white Americans.1 Place myths effectively reoriented the public images of several southwestern towns around the turn of the twentieth century, but the case of Columbus underscores the limitations of the place-myth construct.

He shakes his head at the desecration,then elaborates on a discovery that offers a glimmer of hope for anyone trying toestablish what happened to the more than , Guatemalans who were “disap-peared” in the years of civil strife between  and , missing and presumeddead, many of whom are believed to be interred not only in known mass graves incemeteries like Quetzaltenango’s but also strewn around the country in clandes-tine ones now being exhumed