Journey into Tucson

Sunset, Sept, 1998 by Matthew Jaffe

Shadowed and glowing in the low, fading sun before dusk, the Sonoran Desert on the eastern edge of Tucson comes alive in all its complex beauty. The spines of cholla glow, their prickly malice deceptively rendered as a benign woolly aura. The furrows of the saguaros deepen, and wildflowers - orange poppies, purple lupine, and yellow brittlebush - regain the mellow richness that the bleaching midday light had stolen from them hours earlier.

Tucson, meanwhile, has disappeared. As I look west from the Tanque Verde Ridge Trail, the distant outline of the Tucson Mountains appears as a ragged silhouette. But in the foreground, this low-rise city of 725,000 that sprawls across 500 square miles of the valley is practically invisible, overwhelmed by the glare of the low-angle sun.

This isn't the first time that I have looked for Tucson and not seen it. Some Western cities - San Francisco certainly, maybe Vancouver - reveal themselves so that even casual travelers feel they have glimpsed the real town. Tucson is not like that. Though I have passed through the city on a few occasions, I confess that short of a vague sense of its deeper vibe, I have missed the things that set Tucson apart.

Yet Tucson may be the one true Southwest city, a place where the desert is still present as something more than just the oppressive heat of summer and where Mexican and native cultures survive not as quaint anachronism but as living parts of the community's soul.

Las Vegas belongs to the world, and Phoenix belongs to the future. But Tucson - a city with origins dating hack to 1694, a city with families that go back seven generations, and a city that backs up to some of the world's lushest desert wilderness - remains linked to its own history, tradition, and incomparable setting.

Driving into history

I only began to truly see the real Tucson during a stay at the Arizona Inn, the 1930 hotel that generations of city residents have gone to for special occasions and turned to for design inspiration for their own homes and gardens. The inn harks back to Tucson's golden era as a resort, and though it once sat far out on the city's fringes, now it is part of the central core.

From the inn, I drove back into the city's history, first through elegant, understated neighborhoods of California-influenced Mediterranean-style homes that clearly had followed the inn's lead. As those neighborhoods grew, they closed the gap between the inn and historic Tucson, where bungalows made of volcanic stone suggested an older community truer to its Sonoran Desert setting.

I eventually reached the 19th-century adobes of the Barrio Historico neighborhood south of downtown, and realized that the Tucson I had missed on the broad commercial boulevards could probably be found here.

So I've returned to the Barrio on a spring day to lunch at the landmark restaurant El Minuto with Tucson writer Patricia Preciado Martin. The author of five books, she was a finalist for the prestigious Arizona Arts Award. Her writing, both nonfiction and short stories, captures the soul of Tucson and southeast Arizona. "Fiction writing is connected to reality," she says. "Just an exaggeration."

And not much of an exaggeration at that. One of her short stories, "El Milagro," is about a woman who discovers the face of Christ on a tortilla. As we talk, people are lining up nearby in the front yard of a south Tucson home to pray to a figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe that the residents discovered on the bark of a walnut tree.

We have a wonderful lunch in the busting restaurant, then we stroll around the Barrio.

As recently as the 1960s, the area was part of a more extensive historic Tucson that gave way to redevelopment and the city's convention center - 250 buildings, not only modest structures but also homes belonging to early prominent Tucsonans dating back to the 1850s, were torn down. Some have compared the Southwestern atmosphere of the remaining old Barrio to a pregentrified Santa Fe.

"There are people who will say it was all blight," says Martin. "Now the Barrio is in." Many adobe homes are spiffed up with bright colors and expensive renovations; others show every bit of their 120 years. Martin marvels at all the changes, pointing out a friend's new compound and telling stories of onetime residents who can scarcely believe what their old adobes are now worth.

The community is no longer a barrio in the classic sense of the term, or the neighborhood it once was when it was known as Barrio Libre. Then again, neither is it a theme park.

Old-timers sit outside their front doors on rickety folding chairs, and folks working on cars and houses add just the right contrast to the pristine perfection of the rehabbed structures.

The ties that longtime Tucsonans feel extend beyond the old city neighborhood, out to the surrounding Sonoran Desert. Martin says people still head out to long-abandoned ranchos to visit crumbling adobe houses on lands that have been in their families for more than 100 years. Like the desert, which effortlessly crosses the border, cultural and family currents also flow freely into Mexico, making Tucson both of Arizona and Sonora.