Tucsonense

The Phoenix metropolitan area is the Great American Average and a mirror of the American sensibility.

Since January 2017 I have been spending most of my time recording oral histories for Special Collections at the University of Arizona Libraries. These histories capture some of the everyday stories and subjective experiences that seldom make it into an archive: what it was like to grow up in a Chinese grocery store, or be the second black graduate from the UA Law School, or move to Tucson to be closer to the Yaqui community. This episode will give you a few brief glimpses into what I've been recording lately and, hopefully, explain why I have been absent from Tucsonense. Thanks to Anthony Sanchez for the episode music. You can find more of his work here. Thanks also to the University of Arizona Libraries for making all of these oral histories possible.

Francisco Cantu is an author and former US Border Patrol agent. We drove through his old sector and talked about a lot of things, but this story only focuses on one of them. Francisco's forthcoming book is called The Line Becomes a River. It is due out from Riverhead in 2018.

Patricia Preciado Martin is an author, oral historian, and speaker whose work has been invaluable in preserving and sharing stories of Mexican Americans in Tucson. Her books include two oral histories, Images and Conversations and Songs my Mother Sang to Me and three collections of short stories. We spoke about her memories of growing up in Tucson, how her thinking about ethnicity and identity evolved throughout her life, and how recording oral histories changed the way she thought about Tucson, its people, and herself.

A visit to Tucson's Gadsden-Pacific Division Toy Train Operating Museum, a 6,000 square foot world of tiny trains and the men who run them.

Isaac Kirkman is a writer and poet. In addition to working with words and a fair amount of border activism, walking is a large part of Isaac's life—he doesn't drive and never has. People who walk long distances look at cities in fundamentally different ways than drivers, public transit riders, or cyclists. They see more detail, obviously, but they also have access to different spaces and can spot patterns in the urban fabric. I hope to be talking to (and walking with) a fair number of them as Tucsonense unfolds. On a 109º July afternoon, I joined Isaac for a six hour walk around Tucson. We talked about the city and the essence of place, writing and cartels, but we also talked about how Tucson fits within his personal narrative. Then, because six hours of walking wasn't enough, we went on another walk a few weeks later. I didn't record everything but I recorded a lot and edited more.

We live on top of the Hohokam—their buildings, ball courts, canals, fields, and bodies—yet most of us know nothing about them. Maybe that shouldn't come as a surprise. Arizona residents are famously transient and even Americans in relatively stable communities are often ignorant of the Indian landscapes underneath them. Sometimes that's because it's easier to ignore Indian history than confront the questions raised by studying the past, other times that's because Indian worlds are so thoroughly erased that they're hard to imagine or narrativize. I am ignorant of the Hohokam world—embarrassingly so, both as a Tucsonense and as someone with Hohokam pottery in his back yard. A few childhood visits to Casa Grande National Monument and half of a class in graduate school left me with some impressions, but little sense of who the Hohokam actually were and what their world looked, tasted, and sounded like. Luckily, the professor who taught the Hohokam portion of my grad school class was Paul Fish, an archaeologist who has been studying the Hohokam for over three decades. Six years later, when I emailed Paul and his wife Suzy (also a Hohokam archaeologist), they agreed to show me around one of their dig sites. This episode is the heavily-edited result of three hours of walking around the Marana Platform Mound site. My hope was to draw a picture of Hohokam life, to animate a subject that is intensely human and yet, so often, frustratingly vague and distant. We spoke about trade and architecture, food and society, but drawing inferences about the past from an incomplete record of material evidence is difficult and imprecise. An intensely emotion-driven narrative would be impossible here, which makes my job as a storyteller especially difficult, but we've got a wealth of intriguing clues and ephemera that will, hopefully, help you look at the landscape (and the agave) with an added layer of richness. I've decided to leave this episode with only a brief mention of the Hohokam collapse/transition/pivot/whatever in the fifteenth century. This isn't because I don't find that moment fascinating, but because I wanted this episode dedicated to the regular Hohokam world. I will return to the dramatic fifteenth century in a future episode which, I suspect, is going to be titled Who are the Hohokam? As the title suggests, I want to trace the Hohokam legacy from their archaeological end to the present day, to understand a bit more about the points of continuity and difference between the Hohokam and current Indian groups, and to explore the story behind why Casa Grande National Monument no longer uses the term "Hohokam."

What is a place? This question seems simple, but the more you think about it, the more headache-inducing it becomes. Of course, I can't launch a series about place without trying to define what one is. To that end, I outline two extremes of thinking about place: everywhere is unique and everywhere is basically the same. Both are silly, so I try to justify taking a middle way, which is intuitive but not easy to articulate.

You can't launch a podcast called Tucsonense without tipping your hat to El Tucsonense, a Spanish-language newspaper that ran in Tucson from 1915 to 1962. In this episode, you will hear about El Tucsonense's history from Ernesto Portillo, Jr., editor of La Estrella de Tucson and columnist for the Arizona Daily Star. You'll also hear from Richard Elías, a Pima County Supervisor and great-grandson of El Tucsonense founder Francisco Moreno. Then we're off into the archives at the University of Arizona with Bob Diaz, a librarian who began digging through old newspapers and discovered why his immediate family kept their distance from his great uncle. From there we move into the present as I talk to Ernesto and Richard about the significance of the word Tucsonense, their feelings about a white guy using (appropriating?) it for a podcast, and how you tell the stories of other people.