Prospecting “Space Valley”: Space, U.S. Empire, and Affect in the American Southwest’s New Commercial Corridor

• In Event: Unsettling Settler Romances

Abstract

This paper explores critical possibilities at the intersection of nuclear/oil imaginaries and queer aesthetic practice in the recently-nominated “Space Valley,” a commercial tract and “pioneering space ecosystem” in the American Southwest that includes the Rio Grande corridor. A territory dotted with institutes like The Very Large Array, commercial satellite and SpaceX launch site Spaceport America, and some of the most commercially viable sites for both hydraulic fracking and uranium mining in the continental U.S., the “space valley” region is increasingly described in terms of its extractive potential: the “uranium fever” (Lorinc 2025); the “oil and gas gusher” (Redfern 2025) and the “space fiesta“ (Activate NM 2024). Constructed by layered fantasies of the production boom, the “American Southwest” is shaped by ideologies formed in and through the colonial inheritances of the region and its ongoing struggles against settlement. Like the “desert,” which Samia Henni notes “stands in for a complex locus of imageries, imaginaries, climates, landscapes, spaces, and histories,” “space valley” is a site of fantasy narrated by entrenched, historically-coded discourses of “America” and the “American West” produced through spatial imaginaries that maintain dominant national narratives and shore up late stage American empire. The region mobilizes struggle against colonial dispossession, nuclear production, commercial space enterprise, civil and military occupation, and gentrification—and yet the fantasy of its simultaneous “emptiness” (Henni 2022) and prospectiveness remain. Resisting the ethos of knowability and mappability that adheres to “space valley,” queer anti-colonial struggle persists in resisting settler colonial structures and, importantly, their commercially-motivated constructions of identity and prescriptions for life and death. This paper looks to identify and analyze present capacious calls for alternative conceptions of space, institutional relations, and affect in “space valley.” Finally, this talk will shift its regional focus to advance inquiries into the Puerto Rico Space Foundation’s efforts to constitute itself in Puerto Rico as the “Caribbean leader in space exploration and innovation” (2025), concluding by examining the economic and social impacts of Puerto Rico's space infrastructure and industry development as a concurrent site of the production of U.S. empire through prospecting and extractivism.

Author

• Daisy Atterbury, The University of New Mexico