ABSTRACT
At first going out there, the author would often drive past the turning into Rand’s acre and reach the end of the dirt track and have to turn around. There was nothing visible from the track that indicated where his land was. Rand had brought the sign up from his old house in Tucson. He said he was home once he put that sign up. Rand’s first step in creating a home on ostensibly empty land was symbolic, much as flags laid claim to the land under the Doctrine of Discovery when European occupation began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rand’s attempt to transform a piece of land with no prior structures or connection to amenities into his home was situated at a confluence of these physical, legal, historical and social processes. The land was in a ‘census-designated place’ called Valle. The acre of land that Rand called home was legally purchased through a rent-to-own agreement.
