A Day at Camp Naco, and What We’re Cooking Up for Unbelievable Borderlands

 

A Day at Camp Naco, and What We’re Cooking Up for Unbelievable Borderlands

Yesterday, Chef Apollon Mark Lewis and I drove to Camp Naco for a planning visit ahead of the Unbelievable Borderlands Dinner & Fundraiser and Festival in October.

We were there to look closely at the Friday-night event: where guests will gather, where the tasting stations will go, what the kitchens can support, and how the evening will move through the site. Nothing beats being on the grounds to understand the practical side of an event. You start seeing where food will be finished, where people will line up, where a conversation might naturally happen, and what needs to be carried from one building to another.

Camp Naco has a calm feeling to it. It sits near the border in a place where the landscape does much of the talking. After our meeting, I took Mark into the town of Naco, Arizona, only about 600 yards from the border wall at Camp Naco. We talked about food, family, what we learned growing up, and how ancestral knowledge stays with us, even when we don't always call it that.

On Friday, October 16, I will lead the culinary team for the Unbelievable Borderlands Dinner & Fundraiser at Camp Naco. The dinner begins at 5:30 p.m. and will be a seated tasting experience under the stars, with limited seating at $120 per person. Tarra Lazos Creative is producing the event.

The menu draws on Black Buffalo Soldier history, Indigenous Arizona foodways, and Sonora, Mexico traditions. We are working with foods such as mesquite, tepary beans, blue corn, prickly pear, chiles, smoked meats, and café de olla. The point is not to turn several traditions into one vague “borderlands” menu. It is to let each foodway have its own history and voice, while paying attention to where those histories meet. Chef Renetto-Mario Etsitty will also join us as a featured chef, sharing his ancestral insights and culinary talents. 

Mark and I have known each other since childhood. He brings a long family food story to this work. His people came from Texas to Arizona during the Great Migration to pick cotton, and his cooking carries the Southern foods he grew up with: greens, rice, cornbread, pork dishes, pickles, and okra. He spoke about his great-grandmother, Miss Mag, and the lesson she taught through her cooking: if there was something in the pantry, there was something to eat. That is not a slogan. It is a way of thinking about food, survival, and care.

The festival weekend

The free Unbelievable Borderlands Festival follows at Camp Naco on October 17 and 18. The program includes talks, walks, live music, food, art, history, movies, writing, science, and a few things that do not fit neatly into any category. It is the kind of gathering that lets people follow their curiosity.

I will lead a Borderlands nature walk. We will talk about plants in the desert landscape, including their relationships to food, use, memory, and place. Nearby, the culinary team will be at the grill, cooking and talking with visitors about ancestral foods. The hope is that people can walk, learn, smell what is cooking, taste something unfamiliar or familiar in a new way, and stay awhile.

The weekend also includes Gertie and the T.O. Boyz, Buffalo Soldier history, tours of Camp Naco, a Battle of Brewery Gulch program, bats of the borderlands, carrier pigeons, the San Patricio Battalion, bilingual story time with Bombero Mero Mero, poetry, film screenings, a Cananea field trip, and much more.

Come out to Naco

The dinner fundraiser on Friday, October 16, is a ticketed event with limited seating. The festival on October 17 and 18 is free, though attendees are encouraged to reserve tickets in advance.

Camp Naco is located at 218 West Newell Street in Naco, Arizona. For dinner reservations or festival tickets, visit campnacoaz.org, email info@campnacoaz.org, or call (520) 432-9031.





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