Historical Analysis of
"Tucson Memories"
By Kathleen Shull
When I was twelve my parents made what I
considered an arbitrary decision to move to Tucson, Arizona. They
certainly didn't consult me, their oldest, wisest daughter about
leaving Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had to leave friends and everything
I considered life for a town I could not imagine, nor cared to
get to know.
I was in one of the first freshman classes
of Saguaro High School on Tucson's eastern edge at the time and
for the first time in my life I elt like an anonymous number.
The school as big, chunky, concrete blocks that had been plunked
downinto the desert like all the other strange buildings I saw:
strip malls and grid neighborhoods, none of which seemed to belong
here along side Saguaro cacti and Ocotillo stalks.
People had been inserted into the school,
but it took a while before it was a community. It had anything
but the welcoming feeling of a neighborhood for a newcomer. Everything
for miles around was brand new. I missed the parks in Albuquerque
or a green patch of anything. There was so much of what I thought
at the time was inappropriate newness being carved out of the
desert and nothing seemed to belong, least of all me.
That is not unlike the feeling one gets
while watching the KUAT public broadcasting video known affectionately
as "Tucson Memories." The historical ancedotes related
seemed as pasted on to the desert landscape as I felt myself early
on at Saguaro High School.
The video was produced as a puff piece to
describe the town in between calls for donations and more money
to help pay for local broadcasting costs. Those who donated so
much money would be able to receive this in the mail and have
it on their shelves to remind them how Tucson really was.
Mainly, the video is a collection of Tucson
High graduates' relating their experiences in Tucson's "early
days," though most of the film took place in the last 50
years and was the latest version of history from Tucson's newest
settlers. Many of these people transplanted themselves from East
of Arizona. One had the feeling they wer eas alien and transplanted
as the stories they related about a place they hardly seemed to
know, but created.
Primarily, business successes who graduated
from Tucson High School explored history in "Tucson Memories."
For a community with deep Hispanic roots going back almost 400
years there was but two brief token Hispanic women to relate their
experiences: Mary Alice Nieto and her husband, Jimmy and Alba
Torres.
What about the El Charro Restaurant family,
who have run the longest family-owned restaurant in America? Not
a word frm them or their famous Sonoran style food especially
the Carne Seca dishes, which were strung up to dry in cages perched
on their downtown patio. Food had to be dried or salted for storage
and preservation. Tucson was a hot, dusty place.
Photo Courtesy of Cochise County Historical Journal Spring/Summer
1998
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There was one photo of three happy-looking
Naties in uniform and many local Native people were not only
shipped to boading schools to be anglicized, but were denied
many things, even though they fought in both World Wars.
Not one photo of the Mission church, the
San Xavier del Bac Church, a rococo gem, just south of Tucson
and a great influence in the settlement of this area.
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It is one of North America's oldest churches
erected by European settled to evangelize the natives.
Only one photo of a group of Asian-Americans
picnicing with cowboy attire, though most people remember the
Chino stores as they were called in Spanish. Some of the oldest
mercantile establishments kept people fed during hard times.
Pat Klein, a native of Tucson, and District
Director of Kolbe's Tucson office, where I interned this year,
told me that the Chinese grocer in her neighborhood kept them
fed and let them run a tab when times were tough.
There is a Marana family with Asian roots
that could have been interviewed for the video, but they were
left out as so many others, whose stories are worth hearing.
Yet they received little notice.
I left Tucson for many years, but the thing
that brough tme back to southern Arizona wasn't mentioned in
the video either: the land, the light, the sky, the stars, the
air, the mountains, the space, the heat, the friendliness of
those who made this their home.
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Statue of Nazareno in the Baptistry
in the Mission San Xavier del Bac
Photograph by John P. Schaefer
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The video concentrated on a small minority,
even clique of folks, whose were successful business owners. Mr.
Drachman and his family and Cele Peterson, who of course had an
influence on Tucson, but who basically just got here before the
rest of us, who flocked here after World War II.
Before that time, Tucson was a dusty desert
town, the most northern outpost of the Spaniards that was difficult
to rule. There were tradesmen, of course, who plied their wares
around the Presidio of Tucson. But the military of the Spaniards
and later the Americans caused much of southern Arizona to grow
steadily. It is hard to interview dead Spaniards and production
costs to do a Ken Burns' type documentary with still photos panned
slowly from left to right and voice-over narrative from diaries
and letters is a more expensive venture.
Still, I think the video did a disservice
to those people who grew here as if from maize stalks as their
old myths relate out of the landscape. No one in the Tohono O'odham
nation was interviewed. But their businesses weren't as successful
in the 1920 to the 1970s- which was the emphasis of the film.
They had not yet been able to scalp tourists metaphorically with
expensive turquoise jewelry and hand-woven baskets that had been
given away for an apple and an egg. Nor did they have a casino
yet.
The video briefly went over the injustices
against African-Americans who knew segregation here as well as
their neighbors in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. Many of the
people who settled here were displaced veterans after the Civil
War in 1865. Southern Arizona briefly flew a Confederate flag,
after a Spanish and Mexican one. Mexicans who were used as a source
of cheap labor from time eternal were skipped over like a jumping
cholla is avoided by a horseback rider. Universal justice has
a funny way of taking its time to reach its goal. These people
were left out. And that was the major flaw of the video "Tucson
Memories."
The environment was another gaping hole
in the documentary that failed to remember the space, the desert,
the natural beauty of this place that has drawn people in the
last century. There are few natural disasters here. The last big
earthquake was in the last years of the 19th century in northern
Sonora that put the San Pedro River primarily underground.
There was a river that flowed next to Tucson,
which wasn't always called the Santa Cruz River either. The water
issues that haunt us, threaten us and may stop growth entirely
were never mentioned in the video that concentrated on early rodeo,
early University of Arizona football and the social life of a
few Tucson High School graduates who did well in business after
they left school.
I kept thinking of why I am here. Of how
I dreamed of the space and the sky and the smell of creosote after
a monsoon rain, when I was gone. I longed for the stars, which
occasionally shoot down and give rise to wishes and hopes. A parking
space without a parking meter attached waiting near a favorite
restaurant. The high blue and wispy whiteness of thin clouds suspended
overhead on a long hike outside. The distant memory of no traffic,
no smog, no noise. The dust and the pale green of cactus silhouetted
against a crimson sunset. God, how I missed this place and how
even after 25 years I longed for the smell of it and the space
of it and the bright light of it.
None of this was mentioned in the video
"Tucson Memories." And though old rodeo sites are interesting
and where people played football (where the Old Nugent building
stands today on the University of Arizona campus) may be of value,
there was no mention of the environment of Tucson and southern
Arizona, the real reason people live here today.
That is why I call this place home and the
place I know very much is where I belong.
Tucson Memories |
Benson
Congressman
Jim Kolbe | Kolbe
Interview
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