Gallup, New Mexico, is a midsized town whose identity has for close to a century been bound up in its place at the edge of the Navajo Nation. Here the Navajo come to buy, sell, barter, pawn and trade. Gallup was for much of its life an essential stopping-place on Route 66, the intersection-point of 66 and NM 666, the principal route through the Navajo reservation, and thus the place where tourists might go to buy everything from plastic trinkets and inauthentic dolls, mocassins, jewelry and pots, to genuine Navajo blankets and silversmithing, Pueblo pottery (including illicit antiquities) and everything in between. When Interstate 40 replaced 66, Gallup lost its place as a link between white and native cultures.
This brochure, produced in 2004, exemplifies the complex blending of mythologies that Gallup is seeking to recast and, in the process, reinvigorate its own economy.
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"Buyer Beware!" warning about authentic Indian curios, in a culturally significant page-spread
