Kuwak Beneath Tubac, Barrio Viejo, Tucson and the Borderlands

 

Monsoon Light, Borderlands Time

We were halfway between storms when it hit me that the weekend was already ending. The light was doing that strange desert trick—one side of the sky ink-dark, piled high with thunderheads, the other side rinsed clean and glowing. The skyline was monsoon rain in hypnotic arcs as we headed north, and if felt like drifting between seasons, still tethered to the borderlands we’d just spent days walking through.

Traveling with Lorraine Garcia-Nakata meant the trip never stayed on the surface for long. You don’t just “visit” the border with someone who has spent a lifetime in the work of art, culture, and community; you end up in conversations about memory, about who gets named and who gets erased, about what it means to carry places inside your practice. What started as a simple meeting and work itinerary—Tubac, Naco, Bisbee, Tucson—became a series of scenes that stitched together into something like a love letter, or maybe a field report, from the Arizona borderlands.

Kuwak Beneath Tubac

Yesterday, Tubac came to us first as a feeling: cottonwoods nodding over the Santa Cruz, low adobe lines, a calm that only makes sense if you remember how long people have lived here. Before we walked its galleries and restaurants, before we read the plaques about the Spanish presidio, there was the river—scarce but still present, a dark shimmer threading its way through the valley.

Long before the Spanish brought their fort and their paperwork, this place held another name: Kuwak, often translated as “place of dark waters” in O’odham. That phrase sat with me all day. Dark, not as in ominous, but as in deep, shaded, protected. Standing there, it was easy to imagine the river pools hidden by mesquite shadows, the way children might have known the good spots by heart. The presidio that came later in 1752 was built as a claim, a line drawn across someone else’s home. Yet underneath the colonial story, Kuwak is still there—a quiet current, an older language humming beneath the surface of “Tubac.”

Walking the site, I felt that dissonance: the way a town can market itself as a historic arts village while standing on the foundations of a military outpost that was meant to secure empire. It wasn’t guilt exactly, more like an unease that asks to be honored. To say Kuwak when we say Tubac is one small way of acknowledging that we’re never stepping onto blank land. Even in a “quaint” town, the ground holds the echo of other names, other sovereignties.

 

Elvira’s, Sonora at the Table

We met a writer friend  at Elvira’s in Tubac, a restaurant with Sonoran roots stretching back to 1927 in Nogales—the kind of place whose story is stitched across the border, not confined by it. Inside, glass ornaments hung from the ceiling in cascades, catching the light like suspended raindrops. The room was warm and theatrical, but the food spoke with a steady, grounded confidence.

There’s a particular Sonoran sensibility that reveals itself in small details: corn tostadas so rich they almost ask to be torn by hand rather than knife; a salsa that tastes not just of heat, but of smoke and patient roasting; beef that carries the history of ranching families alongside Indigenous seed-keepers and farmers who’ve held onto beans, squash, and grains through centuries of upheaval. It’s a cuisine born from a desert that refuses to be romanticized, one that demands practicality, resilience, and deep knowledge of water and season.

Eating there with Suzanne and Lorraine, the conversation flowed between bites: stories of studios and exhibitions, memories of family kitchens, the politics of who gets to be called “traditional” and who gets dismissed as merely “regional.” Sonoran food, in that moment, felt like a language that had been speaking clearly this whole time—bilingual, bicultural, rooted in mesquite and wheat, in chiltepín and cattle, in rivers and trade routes and crossings. We weren’t just having a nice meal; we were sat down by the region itself and told, gently but firmly, to pay attention.

Tucson: A City Made of Food

Returning to Tucson through the wash of monsoon light, it struck me that the UNESCO designation—Tucson as a City of Gastronomy—lands differently when you’ve just come from Kuwak/Tubac and a Sonoran table like Elvira’s. On paper, the designation is a recognition of more than 4,000 years of continuous agriculture in this region, a nod to how Tohono O’odham and other Indigenous communities have cultivated the land long before “Arizona” existed as an idea. In practice, it’s visible in the everyday: in farmers markets where tepary beans sit beside mesquite flour and cholla buds; in bakeries experimenting with heritage wheat; in street stands where a Sonoran hot dog tells its own migration story.

The title “City of Gastronomy” can easily slide into branding, a neat badge for tourism campaigns. But driving through town in that post-storm haze, it felt instead like a question: If Tucson is a city of gastronomy, whose gastronomy is it? Which hands, which lineages, are being centered when we celebrate this food? Which communities are still fighting for access to land and water even as their recipes become part of the city’s global image?

We talked about how recognition might be leveraged as responsibility rather than decoration—how chefs, organizers, and home cooks can insist that any celebration of Tucson’s food remain accountable to Indigenous sovereignty, to Mexican and Chicanx neighborhoods, to workers in fields, kitchens, and dish pits. Food as story, yes. Food as economy, absolutely. Food as a path back to relationships that empire tried to sever.

Walking Barrio Viejo’s Living Archive

One of the clearest places to feel those questions underfoot is Barrio Viejo. We walked its streets slowly, letting the afternoon settle around us. The adobe homes, painted in colors that look like they were mixed directly from desert light—turquoise, gold, rose—stood shoulder to shoulder along narrow streets. This is a neighborhood older than the word “Arizona,” shaped when Tucson was still part of Sonora, México, and held together by Mexican and Indigenous families long before anyone called it historic.

But even in its beauty, Barrio Viejo carries the scar of “urban renewal.” Whole blocks were bulldozed in the 1960s and 70s to clear space for the Tucson Convention Center and other development projects. What remains is not simply a picturesque remnant; it’s a living archive, a fragment of a larger body that was deliberately wounded. You can feel it in the gaps where houses should be, in the way the neighborhood is now framed as a destination for visitors even as elders remember the neighborhoods that no longer exist.

We ducked into shops and talked with people tending their own corners of the barrio—a gallery here, a small business there. Each conversation felt like a reminder that the barrio’s survival is not accidental; it’s the result of stubbornness, organizing, memory work. This is a place that has already survived one wave of erasure, now facing another in the form of gentrification and speculative real estate. In that sense, walking there is not neutral. It asks: Are you a tourist in someone’s wound, or a guest willing to listen, to support, to stand with?

Monsoon as Elder

The monsoon stayed with us all weekend, an unruly elder, unpredictable and insistent. Storms rolled over the mountains, sometimes breaking right on top of us, sometimes lingering just beyond reach like a promise withheld. On the drive back, a rainbow unfurled near Tucson, too perfectly placed to feel like coincidence, arching over asphalt and saguaro as if to say, this story isn’t linear.

In desert life, rain is never just weather. It is infrastructure, ritual, and memory. Indigenous farmers in this region have spent millennia learning to read its patterns, saving seed and shaping fields in anticipation of feast-and-famine cycles. Settler infrastructures tried to rationalize it—dams, canals, and flood controls—but the monsoon reminds everyone that water moves according to its own authority. It brings life and danger in the same breath.

This weekend, each storm felt like a punctuation mark in our conversations. We’d be talking about colonial history and suddenly the sky would open; we’d be reflecting on art and identity and hear distant thunder, low and insistent. The weather made it impossible to forget the stakes of the place: here, every drop of water is politics, ecology, and spiritual reality braided together.

Soundtrack of a Borderlands Weekend

Not all the moments were heavy. Some were tender in their ordinariness, the kind that only later reveal themselves as anchors. Sitting at Time Market, Etta James floating through the speakers, we watched the rain soften the edges of the city outside. People came and went with friends, books, groceries and conversations, all of us sharing this brief pocket of cooled air and music.

There was the ritual of leafing through new cook books—titles on art, history, perhaps a novel that felt right for monsoon season—and the simple joy of knowing they’d follow us home, extending the weekend’s questions into future mornings. There were the quiet jokes in the car, the familiar rhythm of road-trip snacks, the way a song on the stereo would suddenly line up perfectly with the view outside—another small alignment, another reminder that we were in the right place at the right time.

Travel like this isn’t escape; it’s study. It’s a way of sitting with the region differently, letting the borderlands teach through taste and sound and weather as much as through archives and analysis. The soundtrack—Etta, the hum of conversation, thunder, the low buzz of tires on wet road—became part of the lesson.

Leaving Without Leaving

By the time we turned fully toward home, it was clear we weren’t really leaving the borderlands. The trip had shifted something—maybe not dramatically, but enough to notice. Tubac, with its dual identity as Kuwak and presidio town, refused to remain a tidy historical footnote. Tucson’s designation as a City of Gastronomy became less about prestige and more about responsibility. Barrio Viejo’s streets kept replaying in my mind as a reminder of both vulnerability and perseverance.

We talked about staying in Barrio Viejo on future work trips, about returning to Tubac not just as visitors but as people engaged in ongoing projects, about how to deepen relationships with communities who are already doing the work of preservation, resistance, and creativity. Books waited in the back seat, their spines promising further context and complication. Ideas for collaborations flickered—events, writings, gatherings that might help bridge the gap between cultural celebration and material support.

The borderlands, I realized, don’t stop at the international line, or at the city limits of Tucson, or even at the end of a weekend. They travel back with you in the questions you ask about place, about whose stories you center, about how you eat and organize wherever you live. Driving north, monsoon clouds still trailing behind us, it felt less like an ending and more like the first chapter of a longer conversation—a commitment to keep returning, with humility, to Kuwak’s dark waters, to barrio streets, to Sonoran kitchens, and to the people whose lives give this region its enduring, complicated, necessary heartbeat.