Long before the boom of the aughts, long before the bust, I made a pilgrimage to the desert. When I arrived, snow suffused the sand, icicles hung from yucca spikes. It was late 1997, the beginning of an El Niño winter.

I'd come running from Mexico City and stopped in the Mojave because it was close to Los Angeles, my hometown, and because that's where people from L.A.—in trouble with the law, their lovers, their creditors, themselves—go to hide out, lick their wounds, end the affair, bury the body.

I went because my friend Elia was there. She, along with a small crew of L.A. expatriates, optimistic bohos, was creating a life for herself in the village of Joshua Tree, at the edge of the famous national park. Their presence unwittingly helped set the scene for a full-blown art colony and a season of wild speculation in the mid-2000s.

Me, I was simply trying to save my life. I was supposed to be finishing a book. I had "completed the research," as writers like to say to editors when they miss the deadline.

I had just enough in the bank to put down the first and last month's rent on a house down the road from my friends, in Twentynine Palms, a small town sandwiched between the iconic vistas of Joshua Tree National Park and another massive, equally iconic tract of public land: the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, the largest corps training facility in the United States, whose sand dunes had served as a simulacrum of the Middle Eastern desert for the first war in Iraq and would again for the second. The rent was $275 a month; I'd talked the rental agency down from $400. There weren't many takers at that time for shacks in the Mojave sand.

My pre-boom hovel was a small, ordinary stucco A-frame with thin walls and a composition shingle roof, pale yellow with white trim. Names were etched in the cement of the patio, and a year: 1952. There was a fenced yard in the back, and a big garage empty except for a truck engine block lying on its side. Next to the house were a couple of big tamarisk trees that whooshed in the wind. The "street" I lived on (it had been paved once, but now it was mostly broken asphalt and big pools of sand) ran north-south, and the house faced west, the direction the wind blew from, pecking the living room's picture windows with sand. A sign nearby read, "NEXT SERVICE 100 MILES."

I had never seen snow in the desert, had hardly even imagined it, but that is how the Mojave greeted me. A frigid wind blew, and thick flakes fell to efface the land I thought I knew.

On one of my first nights in that thin-walled house on the edge of the one-hundred-mile nothing, I heard what I thought was the hiss of a gas leak. A thorough inspection turned up nothing. It wasn't a rattlesnake or wind through the tamarisks. It took me a long while to realize that I had never before been in a place of such perfect silence. What I was listening to was the blood coursing through my own body.

Natives of Los Angeles consider the desert their backyard, and sometimes—especially when the Santa Ana winds blow hot and dry—tell themselves that the city itself is in the desert. But no, L.A. is "west of the West," as Theodore Roosevelt once famously surmised. What L.A. does is imagine the desert, and it projects those representations to the rest of the world.

I'd been to Joshua Tree before, to the actual place on a couple of occasions, but mostly it had been imagined for me. I'd seen its expressionist boulders in Star Trek episodes (the original series) and "heard" it on U2's eponymous album. In the L.A. music scene there were stories about "country-rock" legend Gram Parsons and his untimely demise in Joshua Tree from a cocktail of morphine and tequila. Joshua Tree was American desert cool incarnate.

During an earlier trip to the desert I started wearing a cowboy hat to declare myself a Cowboy—a man of the West, feet wrapped in snakeskin, guitar slung over my shoulder. I am actually a second-generation cowboy. My father, born in Los Angeles to Mexican immigrant parents, was the first to play the part, having been weaned on the Western via radio, film, and phonograph records: the Lone Ranger, Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, Gene Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers and Marty Robbins. This became my pop culture cradle.

As I grew older, this influence largely turned into a source of embarrassment; the Western as genre was well past its prime, and although I liked the Eagles (everyone did in 1977, my freshman year of high school), I had only a vague notion of who Gram Parsons was, and the alt-country movement was still a generation away. Being Mexican back then was almost cool, insofar as being able to play "Malagueña" on guitar to romance white girls looking for something a little more exotic than the parade of boys with feathered blond hair. But my brownness mostly embarrassed me, too.

The embarrassment gradually turned to ethnic pride, as I felt summoned to fight the good fights: against, first, U.S. intervention in Central America and, later, the cowboy Know-Nothings who sponsored the reactionary California ballot initiatives of the mid-1990s. Propositions 187, 209, and 227 sought to deny public services to "illegals," end affirmative action in California's public institutions, and ban bilingual education. With a ponytail, goatee, and flamboyant ties, I railed against the propositions as a commentator on TV and radio, as a spoken-word and performance artist, and as a writer. Support for the measures came from an aging, demographically diminishing, and economically insecure group of voters, middle- and working-class whites reacting to growing income inequality and the latest waves of immigration. This slice of the electorate canonized the measures with overwhelming electoral majorities—chiefly because most of the new immigrants lacked citizenship or even papers and, thus, voting rights—and crushed my political idealism.

For all my activism, there was no room for a brown cowboy in this debate. I felt the familiar discomfort. It just wouldn't do to sing a Marty Robbins song, even if it was about the border, at a rally for immigrants' rights.

So I went south, to Mexico, to experience another kind of difference. I was a restless thirty-something, and Mexico was a restless place. I found my subject: migrants crossing the border into California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. So I crossed the border too, all along the line of barbed wire and occasionally trampled chain-link that has since been replaced by hundreds of miles of a great wall. Each leap fulfilled a deep and quixotic desire to reconcile my mixed parentage (as the son and grandson of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador). I crossed from Tijuana into San Diego, from Agua Prieta into Douglas. From Columbus to Palomas, from Juárez into El Paso.

I'd come in a big circle. It happens all the time in the desert—the view is so vast that you can't be sure sometimes where you're headed. The land does not change from one side to the other. The flora, the fauna, the mesas and buttes and playas are the same. But the landscape is not.

"The problem," wrote the literary critic Raymond Williams in The Country and the City, "is one of perspective." Any...