Tom - This week on Arizona Illustrated, artist María Arvayo shares her unique connection to Arizona's landscape.

María - I'm a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and in terms of my artwork, it's I've actually had people say that there's nothing native about my work because I do landscapes.

Tom - An exclusive performance from harpist Carla Fabris.

Carla - When I saw the harp for the first time, I just immediately gravitated toward its beauty.

I'm never tired of marveling at all the things that this instrument can do.

It's really sort of tender and delicate, but also very dramatic.

Tom - And flowers and bullets is promoting sustainable ways of living in Tucson's south side.

Tito - Looking at the land, like so much of our work, it's just observing.

It's just watching, it's just hearing.

Literally, you take a step back, like the community's already telling us what the community wants.

Tom - Hello, and welcome to another all-new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

You know, Tucson is home to an abundance of talented artists, many of them from our region's Native American nations.

And these artists can draw inspiration from the dramatic landscape throughout our state, from their own family and heritage, or just day-to-day living.

Next, meet one of them, María Arvayo.

[joyful acoustic guitar] I've always been an artist, a painter, since I was a kid.

I used to paint a lot and draw.

I think mostly because I had to spend a lot of time by myself.

I have siblings and there's a big age gap and so they didn't want to play games with me.

They kind of found me tiresome.

So I could sit and paint for hours and I really liked it.

[melody with a sense of wonder] Here at the Amerind Foundation, I currently have my second exhibit up in the museum.

I've also done a residency here, which was during COVID, which was very quiet.

[laughter] The Amerind Foundation is very supportive of Native artists.

They've been very supportive of me as an artist, which is great.

It's a wonderful place.

So I feel really fortunate to have been able to spend time here, to actually wander around, to paint it, and just to enjoy it.

[sound of thunder rumbling] You know, the storms would come in the late afternoon and evening most of the time, and we'd go out and play in it.

We'd go run around, slide on the sidewalk, dance around in the rain.

In the thunder and the lightning.

You know, it was a celebration for sure.

[sentimental acoustic guitar] I'm a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and in terms of my artwork, it's, I've actually had people say that, you know, there's nothing Native about my work because I do landscapes.

So I do some abstracts.

I do, I'm a contemporary artist.

Native people are, you know, they're people.

[laughter] And they are, they're all individuals.

We're all different.

We all have different backgrounds, education, etc.

So, you know, I think there's a good deal of stereotyping about what Native Americans should be or what a Native American artist should be.

My family is from Sonora on both sides for generations.

This is very much my home.

And I feel very, very connected to the landscape.

And so my love for the landscape, the region.

I hope is reflected in my work.

[sound of birds and nature sounds] Keep your hands on your back.

Good, keep breathing.

Good.

I've been practicing yoga for a long time, and then eventually I decided to go to yoga school, yoga teacher school, and now I teach.

Point and flex your feet.

Which really wasn't the plan but it just sort of happened.

And I enjoy teaching yoga.

I work predominantly with folks who wouldn't normally walk into a regular yoga studio.

There.

Okay?

Alright.

Good.

So they get, they're surprised about how good it feels.

And, you know, I tell people, I go that's why people who do yoga keep doing yoga.

Because it feels really good.

[laughter] It feels good in your body and mentally.

It's like a little vacation for your brain, you know, to stop worrying about all of the things that you normally worry about.

I feel a connection between yoga and art for me, but I think it's because they're both part of me.

It's both part of who I am and how I express myself and how I am in the world.

[sound of drawing] [sound of blowing on paper] I always knew that I was an artist.

Whether I was ever going to get any acclaim or fame, you know, that really wasn't the goal.

But I knew I was an artist as a kid, that it was part of who I was.

I liked it because it brought me joy, and I liked being able to look at the end result.

[song concluding] Tom - Carla Fabris is an innovative harpist who's currently working as an instructor at the University of Arizona, Fred Fox School of Music.

Now, her unique style showcases the diversity and range of the harp as a solo instrument.

Carla recently sat down for an exclusive performance for our cameras.

[footsteps] (Carla) When I saw the harp for the first time, I just immediately gravitated toward its beauty.

[playing harp] Every harp has some sort of personality, and once you start playing one, you realize what richness and resonance you have at your fingertips.

Also realizing that you're pulling on so much tension.

It's so resonant that you really have to manage every sound you make.

So you have to be careful not to dampen anything that you would like to have ringing.

and yet to still be clean in the passages that you would like to have really clean and accurate.

The choreography of it is really important to me.

If you do it right, it should look like a mesmerizing dance.

There's times that you should be efficient with what you're playing, and then there are other times where you can release some energy with an arm movement.

You should be kind of sitting up and leaning into it as much as it is leaning on you.

I never tire of marveling at all the things that this instrument can do.

It's really sort of tender and delicate, but also very dramatic.

Of course, gaining a richer and deeper sound that comes with time.

So I try to really stress the importance of cultivating the patience.

If I'm doing a performance and I'm doing what I would like to do with it, everybody's thoughts about their day would completely fall away.

If I could even heighten their experience of something they're going through, whether it's positive or negative, whatever it is in that moment, I'm happy with that and I think that that makes a good performance.

[playing harp] Tom - What began as friends helping each other create backyard gardens in Tucson's Barrio Centro has evolved into this vibrant community space all around me.

Now, by sharing skills, promoting place-based connections, and listening to each other's stories, Flowers and Bullets is promoting sustainable ways of living.

The organization was able to buy this abandoned school and is creating a farm and health and wellness center for the community.

Join us now for their story of vision and transformation.

[Music] We're here to celebrate, give thanks to the land, give praise to the energy for the history that has taken place here.

This has been a long, long time in the making.

The school was abandoned for quite some time.

If you all look to the north here, you'll notice that this building is under a lot of construction, demolition.

As you see, we're working with the land.

You can always check our website flowersandbullets.com.

See how you can help out, support, contribute... [as the voice fades, a balmy drone soundtrack intensifies] We'd drive by this school all the time and it's been abandoned since 2008 and we're like, "Dang, like imagine like all the possibilities that can happen there."

And it's like, "Yeah, right, you know, it's huge."

We have all these vacant lots.

We're on 22nd Street, so on 22nd Street and south of 22nd Street, that's where you get like more dialysis centers, more smoke shops, more predatory lending, more liquor licenses per square mile.

So we knew that it was important to do something.

It was either like join another non-profit, join another community group, or take like the resources and the knowledge and the skills that we've been getting for so many years and implement them.

We just feel that coming from these communities, people from the outside look at them as run down, as ugly, as ghetto, as those neighborhoods, you know, that are underserved.

We just feel that like, coming through these hardships and seeing everything that goes down in these neighborhoods, we can still create something beautiful.

In 2011, we started with a t-shirt company and it's like, "Okay, how can we create images that are just like powerful images?"

At that time, we're already kind of growing corn, squash, beans, the three sisters in my backyard, trying to experiment with growing, right?

Because of Mexican American Studies classes, they're like, you know, your culture is important.

Like if you want to know who you are, where you come from, like plant corn, plant maíz.

And I was like, challenge accepted, you know?

All right, y'all, when y'all ready, we're gonna come circle up by the milpa over here.

As I was like smudging you guys, I was giving lots of blessings to y'all and the journey that you guys are in, we're all on a different journey.

I've been learning more about my lineage and my Indigenous practices through my community.

And so I've been in the process and journey of becoming a healer.

Welcome, this is your space.

So I really appreciate everybody being out here.

These seeds we brought up from Oaxaca.

This is a yellow corn.

I just appreciate y'all for being here.

Pass it over.

You want to say your name, who you are?

Hi, I'm Aiden.

He/Him pronouns.

Yeah.

I like how everything's connected, you know what I mean?

The rainwater to the goats, you know what I mean?

And then the manure, everything's intertwined, you know what I mean?

Kind of like life, you know what I mean?

I feel good to be here, man, representing for you guys, you know what I mean?

I admire what you guys are trying to build and create.

And I thank Mother Earth for donating these, and it's gonna metamorphosis into something more beautiful, you know what I mean?

My name's Araceli.

I live in the neighborhood and this farm has become very special to my kids and I so we're really excited to see what comes out of it in the future.

Also want to acknowledge my tío, my tío Pony who passed away.

Passed away on Thursday.

Just thinking a lot about him, his memory and who he is and how special it is for me to to be able to do this.

Like I said, we're all so disconnected from our lineages, from our food, from our people, from our health, our wellness.

So, this is what's going to make us healthy again.

Being connected to our food, to our lineage, to our culture, hearing the ancestors.

I kind of got involved in 2013.

At that moment I was seeing Tito and Jacob installing gardens.

We went to the same high school.

They're a little older than I am but they were my mentors.

I was in the Mexican American studies program, and I met them through that movement when Arizona tried to ban ethnic studies.

Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer just approved a bill banning ethnic studies classes in public schools.

They said that they were teaching us how to overthrow the government?

and that they were teaching us how to hate white people.

So that was the rhetoric.

Oh and then like that they were giving us free burritos.

There's like a daily show that they came and they interviewed the guy.

They would every week go out and buy burritos and feed these kids.

What?

You slip your burritos to kids don't you?

Why would be giving food to our youth be something that frowned upon?

I was the last year, the last graduating year that was able to take the courses.

There's a very popular proverb, you know, like they tried to various, but they didn't know where seeds.

Actually being in the Mexican American Studies, that's kind of when my eyes were open to the food apartheid that's happening in our neighborhood, and the relationship between my family's health, and like the area that we're growing up in right and the stores that are available to us.

So I wanted to go back to those traditional kind of ways of growing food.

At the time I met Tito and Jacob they had just started the shirt company called Flowers and Bullets.

We were helping Tito out with his garden at the time.

Jacob wanted to start a garden.

And then I just kind of naturally saw the way that when people came to a meeting or when folks were sketching out the next Flowers and Bullets shirt design, people were really asking questions about the garden, or people were curious about the water catchment system or just you know just the things that they didn't know about they were really curious about.

When I started planting these corns, and my friends would come by and say, "Dang, what are you doing?"

They'd come by just to hang out, just to kick it, just to find a place to feel safe, you know?

And we'll start talking about the garden, we'll start talking about the corn.

That got folks curious to start a garden in their house.

And so slowly, we built something like 20 gardens in the span of four weeks.

We were just really passionate and young and had all the energy in the world, you know?

So I was just like a knucklehead in the neighborhood or whatnot, just kind of stopping by.

I would check out Tito and Jacob's house every now and then, realize that they were growing food and they started telling me a little bit more about the food, a little bit more about in depth of why they were doing it.

Should I move this plant or should I leave it?

Just let it grow around it?

At that time, I didn't really have a full-time job, so I was kind of just, yeah, coordinating a lot of like the home gardens.

When I started doing this work, I started feeling really good, really empowered, taking a lot of that knowledge home to my own family in my own house.

I was about to have a little boy, so I wanted to change a lot of my living lifestyles.

I wanted to be more around like-minded people that was more positivity and created something for my community and for my son.

People were like, "Cool, I have a garden, but what do I feed it?"

And so then we were like, "Oh, maybe we need workshops, soil workshops."

Programming was developing as folks were curious about topics.

She was like, "Hey, you guys are talking about culture, you guys are talking about resistance, look at these cool images...

But the people are genuinely interested on the gardening and the farming aspect of it.

They're asking genuine questions like, I think we have something here."

So that's when kind of like, Flowers and Bullets was born.

Flowers is the art, that beauty, the families, the culture, the traditions, and bullets is like that struggle, the realities, the hardships, the resistance.

The mission is like, how do we build an empowered, equitable barrio centro?

And our focus is health and wellness because we know that health and wellness to us, is like learning your culture, is learning your traditions is planting this corn, is being able to address some of the social and economic issues that are happening here in the community, right?

A lot of us that are part of the program, part of the collective came to school here.

This school was two meals a day for our kids.

This was youth sports for our kids.

This was employment for the community.

This was just a safe space.

And from one year to the next, everything was just gone.

And one day we got a letter at our door that said, "Hey, Penske, the trucking company was going to buy it all.

Buy it all and make it into a parking lot."

And I looked at Tito and I was like, "What the heck?

Did you know about this?"

He's like, "That's my old school."

And then we just decided to first tell our group.

At the time we were just a little group of maybe... ten, twelve people that would meet consistently every weekend to put in work on each other's gardens.

That's what it was.

And everybody was from the neighborhood.

So we were like, "How do you all feel about this?"

And they're like, "Well, what can we do?"

We're like, "Let's just show up and ask questions."

Someone yelled like, "Raise your hand if you don't want this crap."

At that moment in time, TUSD turned to us and said like, "Well, what do you all want?"

And it took us almost two years to submit the final proposal.

"The I passes unanimously."

Five years later, six years later, we go back to try to buy the property, and we got another unanimous vote.

So I think we're just doing it.

It's another validation that everything we're doing is just right on the, we're on the right track.

None of us have ever owned a nine-acre land.

And so none of us have had this huge land to grow food.

And so it came with a lot of learning curves for sure.

It was finally a space that we can make our own for our families that look like us and do the work that we know that was needed here in Barrio Centro.

Last night I came around like, eight-thirty, and she looked like she was really feeling uncomfortable and looking like she was getting ready to give birth.

And both of them were born and they were out kind of just, you know, running around, kind of, starting to nurse.

Big old hawk just flew into this tree.

There's a big hawk in there.

Looking at the land, so much of our work is just observing.

It's just watching, it's just hearing.

Literally, if you take a step back, the community is already telling us what the community wants.

It's up to us to hear it, and implement it and do it.

But same thing with the hawks and the lizards, the horn toads, the birds.

It's like, we're really paying attention.

We're seeing what's landing, what's here.

And it's like, okay, how can we create more of that and continue to add to that habitat?

Working with this water, working with these animals, working with these elements, working with these crops and crop production, it's not just going to heal ourselves, heal our community, but also heal the land, restore the land.

It was part of our agreement with TUSD that we had to demolish the building.

We demolished two-thirds of it, kept two buildings.

One of them is going to be used for like administrative workshop space.

Another one is going to be for like seed saving, seed lab, things that are goin to be related to the farm space.

Luckily our job, our work is land-based.

So we started on the land, we started farming, we started with agriculture, and slowly we're working into the building.

[sound of drumming and shaker] [voice starts singing] We're caring for these plants, these seeds, these animals in a very intentional, a loving way... that is what our culture and our traditions show us and teach us.

We're a Nahua people, we're Indigenous people.

A lot of us are from Mexico or from the south somewhere, you know, but migrating to the north, migrating to the United States, you literally put so much of your culture and so much of your customs and traditions behind you.

The way that we plant is ceremonial, you know, the way that we harvest our animals and our livestock here is ceremonial and it is a way that brings an aspect of humanity and spirituality into this space.

So I did grow up in a ranch in Mexico.

And yeah, we were growing sugar canes, corn.

I remember just walking down the field with my abuelito and I did take it for granted.

I know in the beginning my mom was a little confused.

She's like, "I literally walked miles "to get away from this, "to give you a better opportunity, right?"

It really fed my soul.

And bringing my mom here, and my abuela here, she was also disconnected as well.

She was forced to be disconnected.

And so it's been really great seeing her grow her food as well.

Not too long ago, we had our ten-year celebrations.

A lot of community groups are not around after a few years, People of color, buying back their old neighborhood school, giving it back to the community, making a safe space for the community, doing a crop production, green spaces, things that are gonna be important for the future.

I think we don't even see how impactful and how historical it is what we're doing.

[music] Tom - Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

Claire - What I find most gratifying is that so many people have told me that they just want to walk into my work and stay there, breathe in the color, and heal.

Claire Campbell Park is a phenomenal person and artist.

She is one of the most gentle souls I've ever met.

Julie - Her work interweaves with that notion of reverence in art and about the meditative qualities.

Dan - What I get most pleasure from is just color.

Color and technique, and Claire's piece that I have has exceptional technique and a beautiful sense of color, like any good work of art.

Tom - Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you again soon.