Growing up here in the Texas Panhandle and traveling to New Mexico for late-summer visits, Route 66 has been a familiar, kitchy ribbon of two-lane blacktop. So many of my own ideas about “motoring west,” as Bobby Troup wrote in the lyrics to “Get Your Kicks on Route 66,” were formed from pop culture centering the idea of a white, middle-class, daytripper looking for adventure. Later, my own understanding of Route 66 shifted through hearing stories of desperate economic refugees from the Dust Bowl driven away from their farms and down what John Steinbeck named “The Mother Road,” seeking better times in California.