Exploring Camp Naco, the Buffalo Soldiers, and the Seeds of Untold Stories

 

Exploring Camp Naco, the Buffalo Soldiers, and the Seeds of Untold Stories

Until very recently, Camp Naco did not exist in my imagination.

I had never walked its grounds, never heard its name in history class, never been told that Black soldiers once lived and trained in adobe barracks just yards from the border in southern Arizona. I’d heard “Buffalo Soldiers” in passing, maybe as a lyric, maybe as a phrase floating through American pop culture, but I hadn’t been asked to sit with the complicated human beings behind that name.

So when Tanja introduced herself to me at the Arizona Indian Festival and then texted me about Camp Naco, a place she thought I might be interested in, my instinctive response was the one that has guided most of my life: I followed my curiosity. I went on a deep dive, documentaries, Smithsonian archives, PBS specials, trying to wrap my mind around this chapter of history that had somehow been standing in my own region, largely unnoticed by me.

What I found was not a simple story of heroes in uniform. The Buffalo Soldiers were emancipated Black men who enlisted in the U.S. military after the Civil War, still subject to racism, still denied full citizenship, still relegated to the margins even as they wore the uniform of the state. Many of them were simply trying to feed their families, to find a path into that elusive promise we call the American Dream. When you look closely, you see them on the front lines in the South, along the Texas border, out here in Arizona, holding a line they never fully controlled, for reasons that were never entirely their own.

It’s a story threaded with survival and contradiction, with love of family and loyalty to a country that didn’t love them back in equal measure. It refuses to flatten itself into a neat morality tale. And that, to me, is where real work and the real possibility begin.

A Tiny Blip, A Vast Convergence

On paper, Camp Naco can look like a footnote. It began as a tent camp in the early twentieth century and was later rebuilt in adobe for Buffalo Soldiers around 1917–1919. It was officially decommissioned in 1925 and then passed through different uses: Civilian Conservation Corps, affordable housing, periods of abandonment and damage. One could dismiss it as a “tiny blip” in the larger flow of U.S. history.

But when Jeremy, the executive director of Camp Naco, began describing it, I heard something else. He talked about Camp Naco as a place where many large conversations converge: Black military history, Indigenous homelands, Latino communities, borderlands politics, Mexico, U.S. relations, refugee narratives, and the ongoing struggle over who gets to tell these stories. There are not many sites in the borderlands that still stand a hundred years later with so many threads running through them.

The camp itself was likely built by local Latino laborers contracted by the military, the adobe structures shaped by hands that had long known the earth before the U.S. Army came calling. Today, about twenty-two buildings remain; some are significantly damaged, but many of the core structures are still standing, adobe walls that have watched the wind change, watched neighbors come and go, watched the politics of their existence swing like a pendulum.

And surrounding those walls is the land: the Chihuahuan Desert, a transition zone from Sonora into Chihuahua, where the Sonoran Desert I know intimately begins to loosen its hold and another desert, with its own cast of plants and animals, begins to take over. It’s an ecological border that doesn’t care about human lines on maps. Some plants are familiar; others arrive with differences in elevation and rainfall, reminding us that human borders are fences, but desert borders are gradients.

When I look at Camp Naco through that lens, I no longer see a blip. I see a convergence point, geographic, cultural, spiritual, where many rivers of story flow together.

My Own Migration Map

Part of why Camp Naco hit me so deeply is that the borderlands are not theoretical to me; they live inside my family story.

My great-grandmother, Natalia Lopez Trujillo, migrated from the interior of Mexico. During the Cristero Wars, her village was burned. At thirteen, a child really, she migrated to Douglas, Arizona. There she built a new life, met her husband, and raised children. She was a midwife and an herbal healer, a woman whose work braided together birth, plants, and survival in a place where catastrophe had already visited her once.

I grew up in Chandler, Arizona, and spent many ceremonial times in Guadalupe, a Yaqui community outside Phoenix, raised traditionally within my culture by my mother, who had been raised by Natalia. Plants were not abstractions in our household; they were relatives. They were the medicines you reached for before you reached for a bottle. They were woven into the stories you heard at night. They flavored the food that reminded you who you were.

As a child, when my mother loaded us into the station wagon, eight kids, no seatbelts in sight, and drove us towards Douglas and Nogales, those trips seemed like long, chaotic pilgrimages. I didn’t yet have words for what she was doing, but now I understand that she was retracing routes. She was always on a pilgrimage, returning to the borderlands that had reshaped our family, checking on the threads that tied us to both sides.

When I pull up a map now and look at Douglas, Bisbee, and Naco, the questions come: How far did my great-grandmother walk? Did she pass near what is now Camp Naco? Did the same dust that gathers on my boots gather on her skirt? These are speculative questions, yes, but I’ve learned that story-making is also an act of spiritual mapping. Sometimes we need to imagine the path in order to feel its truth.

Work as Landscape, Landscape as Work

Professionally, I often describe myself as a cultural worker. My life has been a patchwork: arts administration, storytelling, tourism, Indigenous culinary events, international exchanges, circus, puppetry, and plant walks in the desert. On paper, it might look like “a little bit of everything.” In my heart, it feels like the same work over and over, in different forms: helping people remember how they belong to a particular place and to each other.

For the past decade, I’ve worked with the Arizona American Indian Tourism Association, shaping narratives for journalists who want first-voice stories from Indigenous communities. I’ve collaborated with the Arizona Office of Tourism and Experience Scottsdale, ensuring visitors don’t just encounter “Scottsdale” as a brand but Indigenous Scottsdale as a living reality. I helped conceive and produce the Arizona Indigenous Culinary Experience, curating chefs from tribes across the state who use ancestral ingredients in contemporary ways.

I’ve opened a small café in Superior, Arizona, straight from San Francisco, confusing the city council by bringing in Apache medicine women and Amazonian plant knowledge keepers to talk about food. I’ve worked with scientists at Boyce Thompson Arboretum to design dinners that put Indigenous plant knowledge in conversation with Western botany. I’ve produced events in New York where Indigenous chefs cook Sonoran Desert dinners for Condé Nast and Bon Appétit, and I’ve insisted that, between bites, they step forward and tell the story of each dish, where the seed came from, who their grandmother was, what ceremony the food once belonged to.

I’m also the executive director of the Great Arizona Puppet Theater, where we perform hundreds of shows each year around Arizona ecology, wildlife, birds, plants, animals, alongside fairy tales. Even in that work, I see the same pattern: inviting children and adults to see the desert not as a backdrop, but as a character, a teacher.

When I lead Sonoran Desert plant walks at Taliesin, I begin by stretching the map. The Sonoran Desert is not contained by the border; it extends into Baja and Sonora and beyond. When we talk about migration, people, and food, I remind folks that tribes living near one another often share foodways that cross national lines. Our bodies do not know where one country ends and another begins. Our taste buds certainly don’t.

In that sense, my work feels like a long-term attempt to erase the hardest edges of borders, not in a naïve political sense, but in a sensory one. To help people feel that the desert, the plants, the stories, and the foods have always flowed beyond the lines we draw.

Camp Naco now sits inside that map, waiting.

Food, Story, Ceremony: The Three Strands

One of the core teachings I live by is this: in Indigenous thought, you cannot separate food, story, and ceremony. They are three strands in one braid. A community evolves around its landscape; the plants and animals shape the stories; the stories shape the ceremonies; the ceremonies shape how you gather, eat, grieve, and celebrate.

Take nopal. Archaeologists might tell you it has been a food source in the Americas for around twenty thousand years, but that number is less important to me than the relationships it represents. Depending on the region, nopal appears in different dishes, different rituals, and different metaphors, but it always pulls you back to the land that raised it.

Corn is another traveler. It began as an Indigenous crop in what is now Mexico and spread around the world. Today, people eat corn in Russia, Africa, the United States, and countless other places. But how many of them know its story? When I share these details at my events, people often say, “I had no idea,” and you can see it change on their faces.

The goal is not for them to become experts on nopal or corn. The goal is for that moment of surprise to awaken their own buried stories. I tell people all the time: every single one of us is Indigenous to somewhere. Every human body evolved in relationship to some landscape, some specific foodways, some medicines, some stories. Through colonization, migration, and the seduction of commodity culture, those stories have been disrupted, but they are not gone.

Over and over, I see how food becomes the doorway. Someone comes up after an event and says, “My grandmother in Russia used this herb,” or “My family in Alabama cooked this during hard times,” and suddenly, we are not just talking about Indigenous Arizona, we are talking about their own lineage. It’s like a switch flip, and they realize they, too, come from a people who once knew how to read their land.

That is what I want to bring to Camp Naco.

The Mother of All Chiles

During our conversation, someone mentioned that chiltepin grows around Bisbee and Camp Naco. My ears perked up immediately.

Chiltepin is the only native chili to what is now the United States and is often called the “mother of all chilies,” because many cultivated varieties, including jalapeño, descend from it. It grows wild and unassuming, a small bead of fire tucked into the desert. You have to look for it. You have to pay attention.

I love that image: a tiny chili plant, carrying within it the genetic memory of so many global dishes, growing in the shadow of an old military post where Black soldiers once stood guard on Indigenous land built by Latino labor. If you wanted a single symbol for the borderlands, chiltepin would not be a bad candidate.

Whole stories can be told just starting from that plant. You can talk about Apache relatives moving between San Carlos and the Chiricahua homelands in Mexico; O’odham families who may have migrated during the Apache wars and later became part of the Tohono O’odham Nation; Mexican farmers cultivating chiltepin and other crops along the border; Black families bringing their own food traditions as they moved westward from the South.

You can also talk about contemporary people like my San Carlos Apache friend, a seed keeper who works with high school students, reintroducing ancestral foods into school cafeterias and preparing them for culinary careers rooted in traditional knowledge. These are not museum pieces. These are living traditions.

What excites me is the possibility of inviting visitors to Camp Naco to encounter the desert this way: not as a silent backdrop, but as an archive of taste, medicine, and memory. To say, “Look, this tiny chili in your hand is tied to recipes you know and recipes you’ve never tasted. It bridges kitchens from Sonora to Brooklyn. It grows right here, quietly, while we argue about the border.”

Untangling the Buffalo Soldier Narrative

The story of the Buffalo Soldiers at Camp Naco is not simple, either. For some communities, that uniform represents violence and complicity in campaigns against Indigenous peoples. For others, it represents a narrow but vital pathway to economic security, dignity, and a sense of belonging in a nation that systematically excluded Black people.

Jeremy reminded us that many Buffalo Soldier camps had refugee communities nearby, Mexican families fleeing the revolution who sought safety in the orbit of these military outposts. I can guarantee most of these “Mexican” people fleeing were the Indigenous peoples displaced and now scattered and removed from their stories. In that light, the soldiers are not just instruments of empire; they are also neighbors who, in some cases, helped families survive and relocate. Again, it’s not a story of pure heroes or pure villains; it’s a story of human beings navigating impossible choices in a violent system.

This is where food and story can do something special. When we sit down to share a meal, we are all tasting the same dish, but the meaning of that meal shifts depending on who we are and where we come from. A piece of cornbread might conjure plantation fields for one person, a grandmother’s warmth for another, a church basement potluck for a third. None of those meanings cancel the others out; they coexist.

My hope is that we can create experiences at Camp Naco where people can encounter the Buffalo Soldier story in that layered way. Where an Apache elder, a Black descendant of a soldier, a Mexican American whose ancestors fled the revolution, and a white visitor from Nebraska can all stand in the same space, listen to overlapping narratives, and walk away with their sense of history expanded rather than narrowed.

Food, plants, and story give us tools to do that. They slow people down. They occupy their hands and mouths just enough that their hearts can open.

A Desert That Refuses to Be Barren

Tanja shared that one of the most transformative experiences she had in the Sonoran Desert was joining saguaro fruit harvests. You wake up before the sun, hike out into what many outsiders still describe as “barren” land, and find yourself surrounded by abundance: cacti heavy with fruit, insects humming, birds taking their cut. It is hot, unforgiving work. And yet, after a day of it, you can never look at the desert the same way again.

I  have had this same experience, and what happens is you start to see food everywhere. You see medicine everywhere. You see stories hanging off every branch.

The same is true of agave roasting, of mesquite harvesting, of gathering tepary beans, and of learning which plants your ancestors used to treat illness. Once you’ve participated in those activities, a fast-food burger tastes different. A grocery aisle looks different. You begin to understand why returning to traditional foods has been so important for communities like the Tohono O’odham, who once had some of the highest diabetes rates in the country after being pushed away from their ancestral diets.

I imagine Camp Naco becoming, in time, a place where visitors can have those kinds of experiences. Maybe not immediately in a full commercial kitchen, because the site is still under construction, but in open-air settings that honor the practices of borderlands communities who have always cooked with fire and earth. I picture agave roasting pits, simple outdoor hearths, storytelling circles in the shade of mesquites. I picture a day when someone leaves Camp Naco and drives past a stand of shrubs on the roadside and thinks, “That’s edible. That’s medicine. Someone once survived on that.”

Trauma, Thriving, and What Stories We Choose to Tell

For years now, whenever November rolls around, my phone starts ringing. Reporters call, wanting to talk about Thanksgiving and Indigenous trauma. They want pain, grief, the outrage. They want what I’ve come to call “trauma porn”—stories that center Indigenous suffering without giving equal space to Indigenous resilience, creativity, and joy.

I don’t deny the trauma; it’s part of our reality. But I also know there are thriving farms, new restaurants, chefs experimenting with ancestral ingredients, and seed keepers working quietly to protect the future. So, I shifted the Arizona Indigenous Culinary Experience to November, in part so that when the calls come, I can say, “Let me tell you a different story. Let me introduce you to people doing beautiful work right now.”

Often, reporters are relieved. They’ve been stuck in the same narrative loop and are hungry for something deeper. When they write those stories, the community hears its own strengths reflected back, and that matters. It builds a kind of collective self-esteem; it gives young people something to point to besides statistics.

I want to apply the same lens at Camp Naco. Yes, we have to talk about racism, colonization, displacement, and the complexities of the Buffalo Soldier role. But we can also talk about Borderlands gardeners, Apache seed keepers, Bisbee artists, Black chefs with roots in Texas who now cook in Arizona with ancestral migration sensibilities in their dishes, and Indigenous tourism leaders shaping new narratives of what Arizona looks like.

We can talk about the ways in which Camp Naco, paired with a place like Bisbee, a quirky, artsy tourism destination in its own right, could create experiences that draw people in with curiosity and leave them with something they didn’t expect: an expanded sense of who “belongs” in this landscape.

Beginning with What We Have

Right now, Camp Naco is still very much a work in progress. There are construction zones, limited facilities, and a long to-do list. To some, that might feel like a constraint. To me, it feels like an opportunity.

Throughout my career, I’ve learned to begin with what’s in front of me. If there’s no full kitchen, there might be a patch of open ground for a cooking fire. If the infrastructure isn’t ready for a big festival, maybe it’s the perfect time for small, intimate gatherings that set the tone. If the buildings are not yet restored, their partially crumbling walls can remind us that preservation is not just about freezing history in place but about deciding, together, what we want to carry forward.

I’ve helped navigate permitting for open fires in many of my productions and for Sonoran Desert ingredients towards tables in New York City; we can certainly figure out how to roast agave under an Arizona sky. The key is to treat the current state of Camp Naco not as a deficit, but as a poetic condition: an in-between space where new stories can be seeded before the site is “finished.”

At the grand opening, it will matter what we choose to do and say. It will matter whose voices are present, what foods are shared, and which histories are told first. Opening days create myths. They become part of the origin story.

I would love for Camp Naco’s next origin story to be one of convergence and inclusion, where Black, Indigenous, Latino, and other communities see themselves not as separate exhibits, but as intertwined chapters in a shared narrative of the borderlands.

Seeding Stories, Not Just Programs

As I continue to think about Camp Naco, I keep returning to something that happened at an event I produced in Brooklyn. After listening to a series of chefs share stories about their dishes, about ancestral seeds and grandmothers, migrations and ceremonies, a reporter came up to me in tears. She asked if she could hug me. Then she said, “I live in New York, I’m a reporter, and the world feels like it’s coming at us nonstop. But sitting here tonight, listening to these stories, I felt like maybe we’re going to be okay.”

That’s what I want for Camp Naco.

Not “okay” in the sense of ignoring injustice or pretending everything is fine, but “okay” in the sense that we can still find ways to connect across difference, to humanize each other, to remember that we are part of something older and wiser than our current headlines.

When I work with children from Indigenous communities who don’t yet know their own stories, I take them on plant walks at museums tied to their heritage. We stand in front of exhibits, and I say, “This is you. This is your people. This is your landscape.” And I watch something click. They stand taller. They smile. They say, “That’s us?” It is a small moment, but it matters.

At Camp Naco, I imagine children and adults having similar awakenings, learning that the Buffalo Soldiers are not just a uniform but a complex story of Black resilience; that Apache, O’odham, and other Indigenous peoples are not just names on a panel but living communities nearby; that the desert around them is not empty but full of edible, medicinal, and spiritual life.

I’m not driven by a desire to be written up in glossy magazines, although sometimes that happens. I’m driven by the desire to seed stories. Stories that will keep growing long after people leave the event or the site. Stories that make someone go home and ask their grandmother about a recipe, look up the Indigenous peoples of their own hometown, or volunteer with a local organization.

When I leave an audience, I often say, “What’s your story? You don’t have to answer now but go find it. It’s waiting for you.” I believe Camp Naco can become one of the places where people begin that search—or continue it more deeply.

The Promise of Untold Stories

We live in a time when words like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are being dismantled in policy and in public discourse. We are still deporting veterans. We are still criminalizing migration. We are still, far too often, choosing fear over kinship. It can be tempting to look at all of this and say, “Nothing has changed.”

But to stop there would be to ignore the quieter revolutions happening in places like Camp Naco, Indigenous kitchens, community gardens, small-town theaters, and cross-border collaborations. The promise I feel when I think about Camp Naco is not a naïve belief that one historic site will fix any of this. It’s the sense that, if we tend it carefully, this place can become a kind of seed bank for stories.

A border is not just a line on a map. It is a place where multiple realities collide, where you can taste the tension and the beauty in the same meal, where you can stand in two countries at once and realize that the land beneath your feet doesn’t recognize either flag. Camp Naco is one small but powerful node in that larger web.

My hope is that as we shape programming there, whether it’s an agave roast under the stars, a chiltepin foraging walk, a culinary event with Black and Indigenous chefs, a storytelling circle with Apache and O’odham voices, we remember that we’re not just organizing events. We’re tending to the human capacity for connection. We’re giving people a chance to feel history in their mouths, in their muscles, in the soles of their feet.

And in doing so, perhaps we can move a little closer to the version of ourselves we’re meant to be: people who choose curiosity over ignorance, kindness over cruelty, complexity over easy answers.

Camp Naco is inviting us to listen. The Buffalo Soldiers’ footsteps, the Apache songs, the O’odham migrations, the chili plants, the refugees, the kids who don’t yet know their own stories, they’re all here, waiting.

The question is: what stories will we tell together next?

Read more on the Arizona Indigenous Culinary Experience Here-

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