This week on Arizona illustrated essays from the Borderland.

It's so important that my writin is place based in place aware, and so I wanted to know more about the place that that I was living.

Santa Cruz Church, a pair of feet that walk through that door, and sit in these old pews, have a story to say.

And Dream History Tour.

Rather than having a reading at the poetry center or something that could be easily archived.

Wanted to add something that happened.

Out around town and for the most part, disappeared.

Welcome to Arizona illustrated, I'm Tom McNamara, and we're here in Oracle at the University of Arizona's Biosphere two, the world's largest controlled environment for climate change research.

The planet we live on is Biosphere one.

Now, when this structure was first created, the goal was to recreate the Earth's ecosystem, hence the name Biosphere two now well over 30 years later.

This three acre world class research center thrives with scientific discoveries.

It offers scientists and students hands-on field experience to understand the environmental issues of our time.

Our first story is about another organization that also offers field studies.

They, too, research environmental issues, but they combine it with social justice.

Their students aren't scientists.

Instead, they're part of a creative writing program.

(Francisco) The field studies and writing program is the two week long writing residency in the town of Patagonia, Arizona, which is about 20 minutes from Nogales, 20 minutes from the border.

We spend every summer three creative writing graduate students who have a preexisting research project that intersects with social justice and environmental issues in the Borderlands to write and research and build connections with the local community there.

Sort of a central tenet of the program is reciprocal learning.

The idea is to push back against the often extraction area mindset.

A lot of writers and journalists often come to the border with our students, teach short and creative writing workshops for the high school students.

And then they also work alongside those high school students in the field doing environmental restoration work.

(Lee Anne) Especially as a grad student.

You just don't leave campus, you go to a workshop, you teach, you read, you write and getting out of that bubble and really seeing things for what they are where you are living, even if it's only temporarily as a student, I think that's very important for people in their writing practice.

(Susan) depending upon where our students research interests lie.

We will arrange other kinds of research trips, like to.

The Kino Border Initiative is Migrant Outreach Center in Nogales.

We've had our students do water drops with humane borders so we've had students go out there and learn how to make Adobe bricks.

And then on the days where we're not scheduling a trip, they're engaged in their own research and writing practices.

(Raquel) Field studies for me was an invitation to be at a site of convergence, and for me, that convergence comes in the shape of six different ecosystems, and it's also way to be in a Borderlands community and all of the tensions and revelations and lessons that come from being there day to day.

It's so important that my writing is place based and place aware, and so I wanted to know more about the place that that I was living in, you know, not just the history and the people, but also the ecology.

And Southern Arizona is such a biodiverse place.

My name is Gabriel Dozal, and I'm from El Paso, Texas, and I write about borders and technology.

I'm really interested in where those two worlds intersect.

I think maybe I was going for different reasons and some people, I mean, I was looking at it as a as a time to write and kind of experience something more like home.

I met a farmhand and one of the farms that were there we were working at.

He was born in Mexico.

He came to the United States, is basically a migrant farmer, and he's doing all of this for his kids so that his kids can have a better education and a better life.

And I know that's what my grandparents did.

The name of this farmhand Primitivo, that name, it just stuck with me, and it became like the name of the main character in my in my manuscript of poems Being in that surrounding really influenced everything that I ended up writing, so.

Like for that, I'm really grateful.

(Raquel) Some of the experiences that Patagonia allowed for included a ride along with humane borders, visiting about nine different water station locations.

People are making harrowing journeys north out of desperation and had me thinking about my own relationship to the migrants in my life, primarily my, my, my own father, who traveled from Pachuca, Mexico, in the late sixties and early seventies because he had been caught and deported, caught and deported on his trips to journeys to Texas, to Wisconsin, to pick potatoes, to Watsonville, to pick lettuce and strawberries, and finally settling in Los Angeles, where he met my mother.

So this is a section from my essay.

Do Migrants Dream of Blue Barrels?

And this is a section about my dad.

In the late sixties, he had been arrested for working without papers in San Francisco and was placed in custody on a fishing boat in Alameda, California, for a couple of days, cleaning the deck while agents found him a bus to El Paso.

This was a time when detention centers meant nothing more than a ride to Ciudad Juarez or Tijuana.

while mexicanos on both sides of the line listened to the San Jose, California, band Los Tigres del Norte sing earnestly about contraband and betrayal in a transnational drug deal between lovers gone wrong.

That golden age where you got back on that hill grassy and lush and tried it again until you got it right.

And he did.

My dad got that right.

We were doing mosaics with like this broken pottery, and one of the students started talking about milkweed, about the milkweed in the garden there, and she just lit up her face lit up like she just spoke with it with such care and attention and love.

So this is a selection from an essay I wrote titled Refugium and this is the first section and it's titled Milkweed.

I watched a student gaze down at a milkweed about to flower.

She smiled as her as she brushed her fingertips across its leaves.

Her simple action reminded me of the back rubs I gave my kids as babies.

I'd like to think she blessed the plant into growth.

I've been thinking about radical nurturing as something the world needs about home, about a safe place to land, about a flowering plant that makes its own welcoming world of bloom.

The seeds of the milkweed are made to migrate to silky strings attached to the seeds, allow them to be better carried by the wind.

Perhaps it is the milkweeds entire lifecycle.

one adapted to adversity and equipped to thrive.

That makes it a safe haven for the monarch.

Most importantly, the milkweed shares its gifts of survival.

The larvae munch on the milkweed leaves, which provide not only nourishment, but also a chemical toxic to the monarchs predators.

The butterflies carry this defense and the white spots on their wings.

What a thing to be armed and marked by care.

This is my kind of essay that's interspersed with poems.

There's a border arachnid called a vinegaroon.

It looks like a tarantula mixed with a scorpion.

I asked the students from Bessy, the Borderlands Earth Care Youth Program, if they had seen any vinegaroon while doing their work around different Patagonian farms.

They said they found four at the community center and they gave them disco names Earth, Wind, Fire and Donna Summer.

one of my favorite Borderland Tejano singers is Freddy Fender His voice sounds like a trapped furry animal, but his songs, a mix of Mexican country and American country, represent a lot about the people in Patagonia, as well as in Nogales, El Paso and other border communities.

As Kate Turian from the Deep Dirt Ranch said, Whether you're from Mexico or the US country, people are country people.

Here's a poem I wrote during my time in Patagonia Nationalism in the border simulator in the border simulator, you spend all day with the Salvadorans who've crossed made it past.

Talk about hormonas in pollo make gueros jotos.

In the simulator dialect Intuition immigrants, as you cross the border, you are slimmer.

And with debt, You think in an accent and with death, you think in an accent.

My work has been about the border for a long time now.

When I started writing poetry, I didn't want to explicitly write about El Paso or Juarez, where I was from.

I felt that other writers use stories about the border as a crutch, while at the same time I felt that my border community wasn't progressive enough.

I don't feel that way anymore, but I still keep a discerning ear for stories that complicate standard narratives of the border being from there, and you could offer perspective about the life and language of the Borderlands because I know these people deeply.

I am that community, that multiplicity of selves.

I am rural person and city person.

I am a type of Freddy Fender and a vinegaroon.

Sometimes people need to hear a story.

Different ways in order to to finally have it sort of click for them.

Art has a way of making people feel more connected to the world around them.

As you see, experiential learning can really help students succeed like the students here at Biosphere two, who can go from the desert to the ocean to the rainforest even to the savanna in minutes.

Knowledge and research that'll last for centuries.

You know, there's a landmark in Tucson that's been around for a century, sits on the southwest corner of 22nd Street and sixth Avenue It's the Santa Cruz Catholic Church.

We're going to take a look at the cultural and architectural significance of the church and the community that gathers there.

(cars humming) - [Narrator] The Santa Cruz Catholic Church and it's distinctive 90 foot bell tower dominate the intersection of Sixth Avenue and 22nd Street in Tucson, Arizona.

It's unlike anything else on the visual horizon.

(bells chiming) In 1916, when construction first this was the southern edge of Tucson city limits.

The location was chosen by Bishop Henry Granjon to serve the growing Mexican population on the south side, and because he reportedly liked to hunt rabbits in the area.

Over time the outskirts became the inner city, but the church seemingly unaffected by time, retains it's historic tranquility.

- Things are in flux.

Not in Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz we have many generations, and that really adds to the culture, the connection.

You can go anywhere in Tucson, and somebody has a connection to Santa Cruz Church.

- [Narrator] The history of this building is deep and rich, as are the stories of the families who make up the congregation.

Many have been attending for generations.

- The existence of this parish of Santa Cruz as a community, as a cultural reality, religious reality has been very tolerant.

Tolerance to all sorts of people because of the location that we are in.

We're at the border basically of South Tucson and Tucson.

We've been more connected to South Tucson.

(lively music) - [Narrator] The annual "Fiesta De La Familia" in May brings the community together around food, music, and some beer.

(Mexican music) The crowd is largely Hispanic and working class.

The men bring their own chairs to sit and people watch.

(Mexican music) People dance as the sun goes down.

It is a universal scene, and at the same time, uniquely Tucson.

(screaming) Adults and children are excited to be seen there.

(screaming) - I've been in a lot of places.

I've been in Rome.

I've been in Uganda, but I am very happy to be here.

When I see that tower coming down 22nd Street, it really gives me a great feeling.

You have something that links you to your wonderful past, and architecturally.

- [Narrator] The architect, Manuel Flores, built the structure that was designed by Bishop Henry Granjon.

It was heavily influenced by the churches Granjon saw in Southern Spain.

(cars humming) - Spain was conquered by the Muslim for 400 years or so.

There's some blending between the Arabs and the Spanish culture.

Where it really brings out the highlight of this architecture, it's in the bell tower.

- When World War I ended, the church had not officially opened yet, and the Bishop ran up there an rang that tower, to announce to the whole town the end of World War I.

And I still think that tower has a purpose for this town.

- [Narrator] Under the plaster and the arabic detailing, the tower is built of brick, but the rest of the structure is primarily adobe.

Bishop Granjon reportedly paid Native Americans $10 per load of 2,000 adobe bricks.

According to the 1996 application to the National Register of Historic Places, the church is the largest adobe structure built in Arizona, and is still in relatively good condition.

It even survived a politically motivated bombing in 1924.

(daunting music) Striking miners set off dynamite at the front of the church, blowing off the doors and shattering all the glass in the building.

No one was hurt and you get a sense that today's priests might have sided with the miners - And that's all I'm gonna say about that.

(laughs) - [Man] Oh God.

- [Narrator] The church's spiritual lineage dates back to Europe in the 1500 and the Order of Discalced Carmelites.

- We keep our vestments here.

That's the shield of the Order by the way.

This mount stands for Mount Carmel.

I feel very connected to the priests that went before me who wore those vestments.

We do harm to ourselves when we forget our ancestors.

And these are my spiritual ancestors.

- [Narrator] A group of Discalced Carmelite friars was sent from Spain to Mexico to do missionary work in the late 1800s.

In 1910 they fled the Mexican Revolution, and settled in many of the small mining towns across Southern Arizona.

- They were preaching to the people, teaching them their religion, helping them stay faithful to their Catholic faith.

- As a gift and standing for the friars, this church was built.

- [Narrator] On December 12, members of the Santa Cruz church meet at a small satellite location to celebrate the day of the "Virgin of Guadalupe".

- Just after I was born, we moved to Tucson from Nogales, and we've always been in the Santa Cruz area.

And as I got older, my parents m but we still kept coming to Santa Cruz.

So that's 60 years.

I got married there, and my children were baptized there.

I went to school there.

My children went to school there My grandson goes to school there - I got baptized in nine months here at Santa Cruz Church.

I got confirmed.

Made my Holy First Communion.

All my relatives, my mother, my father, my brother, my grandparents, all that have passed away, we have had the funeral masses at Santa Cruz.

It just means a lot to me that, I feel their presence sometimes here at Santa Cruz.

(chanting in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) - We always think of history in such big terms, but the real history is the way people live every day.

(Mexican music) (speaking in foreign language) - How many feet have gone through the front door of this church?

How many of those people that have gone through have suffered through the Depression of the 1920s?

How many have lost sons and daughters in the first World War, second World War, Vietnam, the Gulf War?

Walking out of the this church brand new, because they now started a new life married.

Expected mothers, for the first they're waiting for their baby to be baptized.

Every single pair of feet that walk through that door and sit in these old pews have a story to say.

Most poets and residents give their readings at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

But Mathias Felina decided to give three walking tours around different parts of Tucson instead.

He calls these his dream history tours, and we tagged along one evening as he took us through his own surrealist interpretation of events that never that date back to before humans had a word for time of the dream logic and the history logic for me.

or a word for ghosts, or word for words Thanks for being here.

This is our first stop for today and this is the MOCA Tucson.

This building was built in 1960, designed by the husband, wife, architectural team of William and Sylvia Wilde, who are known for their modernist and brutalist architecture.

Before it was, the MOCA was a fire station.

And before that, what sat here was the Tucson Light Factory.

The Tucson Light Factory produced all of the light enjoyed in Tucson and the surrounding area from 1905 to 1932, at which point the factory was shuttered and the local light industry was privatized.

My name's Mathias Svalina and I'm a poet and I run a dream delivery service.

I take subscribers and every day for a month.

I write dreams to them and I deliver the dreams by bike to their doors before dawn.

And the dream history tour that I'm doing right now is an extension of that in which I'm trying to embed the dream logic inside of cities and sort of unearth a surrealist interpretation of a city's present and past.

This building here was the site of two rival universities.

one university was the University of Synonyms, and the other university was the University of Cinnamon.

Everything that could be learned at the University of Synonyms could be learned at the University of Cinnamon.

Everything taught in every class with the same.

And yet, when one student was a student of synonyms, every word of every lecture consisted of consisted of parallel meanings.

And when one was a student at the University of Cinnamon.

everything taught in the lectures was a flavor, a spice.

And if you lean in now, you can still smell a bit of cinnamon.

Yeah, I was.

Working in marketing in D.C. for a company that provided personal security for CEOs.

And like, I had four suits from the men's warehouse that I wore on Monday through Thursday, and ultimately I realized my only skill sets were teaching, writing and writing weird --- for people.

At a certain point.

Put those as the primary things in my life and let everything else fall into place as it would.

And you know, the trade offs are pretty obvious.

Frequently have been told about John Dillinger being captured at the Hotel Congress, but you might not know that before he was caught there.

He went for a little walk and he ended up here in this spot, and he stood here for a long time as the sun dipped behind the mountains.

The sky exploded pink and orange, and Dillinger closed his eyes tight so tight, the flashes of light filled the darkness, and as he stood with his eyes closed, he considered for a moment, never opening them again, never returning to the world.

He felt he left behind, which was such a factory of broken things.

Such a chain of brief thrills.

Rather than having a reading at the poetry center or something that could be easily archived, I wanted to have something that happens out around town.

And for the most part, disappears.

A piece of land exists like a symphony.

It exists only that it exists in the experience of it in this way right now.

And then, now and then, right now and again.

And it's like Heraclitus said about stepping in the river but it's also like a puppy curled up asleep and warm on your feet.

Not growing up in this environment, not growing up in this landscape, there's such a surreal visual experience of the desert in the saguaros.

The daily transcendence of light out here is like a weird kink.

So I brought you here to tell you about this beautiful building, the Hampton Inn over here.

We all know the Tucson's one of the longest continuously occupied spots in North America.

You might not know that this area has been populated by ghosts for much, much longer And during the construction of the Hampton Inn, when the workers dug out the foundation, there are no signs of ghost habitation that date back to before humans had a word for time or a word for ghosts, or word for words before words even had to mean anything.

Like every city, you know, the history gets transformed and whitewashed and manipulated in order to tell a convenient story or tell and brand new, convenient story.

Tucson consists of the Tucson we can see and smell and hear, and birds flitting between trees and dust blown wind.

And the geometries that light carves out of angles and also consists of the Tucson that cannot be seen, cannot be sensed, cannot be lived in.

All of the images and all of the stuff and all the matter of experience.

That gets warped and twisted and reiterated and remixed inside of a dream feels like that happens inside of a city's history of itself.

So there's something that is very analogous of the dream logic and the history logic for me.

I brought you here because I wanted to tell you about March 22nd, 1983, when Nina Simone the morning after performing in Tucson sat right here crying and a hummingbird flew up to her face and the hummingbird buzzed once, twice around her head.

On that day, at this moment, this spot became Tucson's fontanelle.

The soft spot where a baby's skull is not yet fuzed.

Beneath the fontanelle lies in the city's brain, a mingling of infrastructure and history and dirt and bedrock and atrocity and love, and all the unseen truths upon which a city relies.

Nina Simone crying here.

Split the city open as you have so many times when so much passion and horror and terror and love gathered around you.

Like a gown made of vines, vined of strained patience and exalt vined incidence and thorn.

And with all the terror and beauty, the city opens at your feet like a galloping horse bursting into light.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you next week.