I think it's a very pleasant ride.

The Rio Sonora is a desert river in northwest Mexico.

It carves the landscape, nourishes the crops, and fashions the way of life of peoples who have lived along its bank for thousands of years.

It may be tiny in size but it looms large in history.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

Representing concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of deserts.

And by The Stonewall Foundation.

Desert rivers, even small ones, not only form landscapes, but shape the lives of people who live along them.

Nowhere is this more true than in villages along Mexico's Rio Sonora.

It's not very long, only a couple hundred miles and it's not very big.

But its historical importance gave the state of Sonora its name.

It begins in the mountains of northern Sonora and ends somewhere near Kino Bay.

That's where my friend ecologist and native Sonoran Alberto Búrquez would like to begin our journey.

If we can get there.

Siete Cerros, the Seven Hills, is a mountain chain that lies in the middle of the delta of the Rio Sonora.

It allows someone to find his way very easily to Kino Bay.

Oh, Alberto, this gives you the big picture up here.

Now, where the glow is from the Sea of Cortez, isn't that where the old Rio Sonora used to flow?

Well, probably one thousand or ten thousand years ago.

Now it goes into the sea about 35 or 40 miles south.

But Siete Cerros is the gate to the gulf for most central Sonora people.

Do you ever get the feeling you're driving right into the sun; into your destiny?

Yes.

This tropical storm that came a few days ago, yesterday was the last day of rain, left heavy rainfall.

They got maybe two years worth of rainfall in one storm, huh?

[Spanish] The hurricane, Hurricane Xavier, came through here a couple days ago, washed out a part of the highway and by order of the local authorities we can go no farther.

Here we are stuck in the Rio Sonora only about ten miles from the Sea of Cortez but that's what the law is.

We're almost at sea level here so there's no way for it to drain.

Boy, it feels like you're inside a humid oven, too.

What a strange sight.

You see the saguesos, the enormous cacti, it's as if they're on the other side of the ocean.

Well, this is the delta you see.

This is the delta, right.

A very flat area.

In this case a huge amount of water.

Yeah, they say they had almost seven inches of rainfall here.

It just destroyed the road, made conditions impossible for.

and this will last for weeks.

There will be plenty of mosquitoes to.

Yeah, I was gonna say, what a terrific time for mosquitoes.

Well, it looks to me as though we can't go down stream anymore.

So, let's go upstream.

In fact let's go up into the valleys and see the chile verde.

Now, I want to see Aconchi.

I'll miss the gulf but Aconchi is worth visiting.

The Sonora River, being a desert river, usually carries only a trickle of water that goes down and surfaces again where dams are found underground.

This flood is unusual in the sense that it's carrying a lot of sediment and water that rained up in the mountains and made quite an impact of erosion in the hillsides.

Just in the last few years the state of Sonora has tried to attract tourists by coming up this Ruta de Sonora, up the Sonora Valley.

It's a very good idea.

I think it's a very pleasant drive, going through the little towns and enjoying the vistas and the landscape.

It's not huge but it does have water.

Well, when I was a kid, David, in my experience just to see this huge amount of water.

Huge.

...Huge.

For a desert rat.

It was like a Mississippi to me.

It's a miracle.

I could have played Mark Twain's adventures on this river.

It was mighty, was big.

And I later realized that when going to central and southern Mexico that of course this was a very tiny, small trickle of water.

Well, there's enough water here to go wading.

It's gotta be a good six inches deep.

It's more than that.

It's at least nine inches deep.

Well, it has a nice flow.

It's inviting to sit.

We never see us as real Sonorans in rivers that carry water through the year.

Yeah, there are no old swimmin' holes that we think in the United States.

There aren't any here in the Sonoran Desert, there just aren't.

And I suspect that when the Pimas and the Ópatas lived here there was a lot more water then.

Well, there was no cattle around and no gnats, by the way.

That's right.

That's right, the gnats come with cattle feces, right?

That's where they breed.

Indeed, yes.

Well, we know there's water here but it'll be interesting to see what's upstream, say by Ures and Baviacora so let's head up the Rio Sonora.

Let's go tourists in Guadalupe.

Cause that's where the real agriculture and the towns are.

One of the things that makes the history of Rio Sonora interesting is that the towns were not terribly friendly often.

They were battling each other over resources and here were Pimas in battling the Ópatas upstream.

In this area you have much land to do agriculture.

Well, you can see out here.

I mean, there's the edge of the Rio Sonora, that cliff over there.

And there's nowhere you could plant in here.

This is.

The Sonora River is a small river.

It starts up in the mountains of Cananea at Sierro los Ajos in a place called Ojo de agua de arballo.

It is not very high.

It is about 5,000 feet in elevation.

And then it quickly drops down and it starts running toward the desert.

First, it runs in pine and oaks, then it goes into this tern scrub tropical vegetation and finally makes its way into the true desert, in the plains.

But all the time the river carries water and creates a ribbon of greenness that goes down into the desert and finally feeds the plains making them flourish near the coast.

Hey, there's much better flow here than there was down below.

There must be ten times as much water at least now as there was five miles below when we looked at it down there.

From the color of the water, about 1,000 times more mud in it.

Well, we've not crossed the Rio Sonora.

Let's go to Ures.

It used to be the capital of the state of Sonora.

I find it hard to believe but it was.

Well, it has fine buildings and a lot of history.

Welcome to the first toll pay that we get to see in this part of the Rio Sonora.

One trip that I made of 30 miles there were 89.

The Rio Sonora region with these beautiful towns like Baviacora, like Aconchi, Huepac, is perhaps the finest example of Sonoran Desert, Sonoran culture, of Sonoran food, crops and of course the people.

The people of the Sonora River they have cultures going back thousands of years.

Thousands of years.

Buenos dias.

...Buenos dias.

[Spanish] These popcorn balls, they call them punto duro, hard points, they're entirely made from products on the Rio Sonora.

The corn popped and then covered with the liquefied product of making sugar.

It's actually made right here, ground right here.

And this is called jamoncillo, it's boiled milk with brown sugar in it, add a little bacon soda.

Boil, boil, boil, boil, boil and you've got jamoncillo.

And this is the stuff, the same stuff, we called it penuchi when I was a kid living back East.

But that was many centuries ago.

.green corn tamales, tamales de carne.

That's tamales with meat in them.

Taquitos de carne are little tacos, con chile, with chile in them.

Machaca is a pounded, dried beef and sautéed with vegetables.

Good stuff.

Quesadillas are cheese and tortilla sandwiches.

That's the Rio Sonora menu, right here, painted in Guadalupe de Ures.

They better not want to change that menu very much cause they have to go, "How I will erase this for today?"

This corn, and you're a Sonoran, you know this.

It's actually corn taken right off the cob and then mixed with pieces of chile, you can see the little green bits in here.

And what else?

Little cheese.

Little cheese and some warm milk.

And some milk, yeah.

You can only get these at certain times of the year.

The corn is only fresh probably three times a year here I would guess.

Yes.

But I think in the past there were more different races of corn.

Different races that ripened at different times, yeah.

That's right and different times.

This is pinole, horrible looking stuff.

This is actually ground popcorn with a little bit of milk.

This was a basic food of soldiers during the colonial era and before that the people, native peoples who lived here, carried a sack of it.

Add a little bit of water, in this case we've got milk, which they didn't have.

And at first it's a surprise and then you realize it's really tasty.

It's sweet because ground popcorn is sweet.

So this is a kind of peanut brittle.

Peanuts in a base of brown sugar.

And as you can see, it's very, very sticky.

And it's very, very good.

It's like a very fresh peanut brittle.

Ah, toll pay.

How many toll pays are there in Mexico?

I think there are more toll pays than roads.

Boy, they'll break your axles if you don't slow down.

Rio Sonora is a small river.

It spans less than 400 kilometers in length.

That's about 250 miles.

However, despite it's small proportion compared to other rivers, it really goes to a region that is very rich in cultural terms.

This is not just an ordinary vehicle selling elotes.

This is real art.

This guy, he wants you to know he's selling corn.

This is great.

Look at the decorations he got.

I like this guy.

He's a promoter from way back.

Look at the white corn.

Those are beautiful.

The thing you do is just pinch, pinch a grain and if it's milky.

If it spits you in the eye?

.it's perfect.

Perfect, okay.

So these are ready to be.

Perfect.

Okay.

[Spanish] So these are 15 pesos a dozen.

15 pesos.

That's $1.50 a dozen.

That's not bad all.

Chile verde or chile colorado.

[Spanish] You know, people who sell elotes with art have a place in my heart.

And we will come into the land of chile colorado, the red pepper.

Well, I want to see these red chiles.

And chiltepín in the hillsides, too.

Yeah, the wild chiles.

Yeah.

Wild chiles, yes.

Despite it's small size in surface area, the Rio Sonora really encompasses a wide variety of cultural settings because it goes along many different habitats.

People from many different ways of earning their life have used the Sonora River and this flow of life, water carried from the mountains into the desert, keeps these thriving cultures going.

So, Ures.

150 years ago the capital of Sonora, the wealthiest city with its own buildings, yeah.

Bumps.

Look at the old crumbling adobe.

Adobe, yeah.

Very thick walls.

But you can't see the plaza for the trees.

Yeah, I think of all the plazas on the Rio Sonora that Ures has the biggest trees.

These old sebas.

It makes the plaza look rather small.

Yeah, it does.

Look at the size of those over there.

They've got to be over 100 feet tall.

I love the elephant skin appearance of the bark.

Yeah, it's nice.

Really nice.

Very tropical and they do well here but not very far north.

It gets too cold.

No.

I was one of the original people who planted these trees.

I brought eight bald cypress from the nursery in Hermosillo.

The really big kapoks were brought here and planted by my grandfather.

I am a native son of Ures, one of the last old men left.

So this is by far the biggest town on the Rio Sonora, upstream from Hermosillo on the Rio Sonora.

The other town's really pretty small, a couple thousand people at the most.

Well, for what, 40 years, it was the state capital?

It was the state capital and just showed the shifting power along the Rio Sonora.

In Hermosillo one or vice versa I don't know because Hermosillo is now a heavily polluted city with.

700,000 people.

.such problems with crime and so on.

But Ures remains a peaceful town.

Well now that Ures is behind us, we're gonna go through Puerto del Sol, that sort of pass where the river broke it's way through.

Then above there is what I call, maybe you don't but I call, the real Rio Sonora.

Oh, Alberto, my goodness, here comes Odope.

Odope, another one.

Another Odope.

This is the 11th?

...This is the 11th.

Now you have to slow down for these or you break your face and your axles, your shocks, your springs.

So here they advertise that they're selling chiltepíns so let's see.

Chiltepíns are a wonderful, a wonderful commodity.

[Spanish] So this is last year's crop.

But it's still.

My experience is that the older it gets the hotter it gets.

[Spanish] Just the smell of it is.

Oh, you are just risking your life.

All right, look, I'm gonna try one, una semilla.

I'm gonna just try one.

Well, so far it hasn't start.

Ah, ah, I think it is chiltepín.

And the rest, the tiniest little bit, yes, it starts steaming out your nose.

But it's so good, you know.

It's just like fire.

Chiltepín David is that wild chile growing in the mountains.

It's wild.

They picked these up near Bacadehuachi.

And this is the ancestor of all chiles.

It's going to be a good year for chiltepíns.

For the rancher, the recent rains have been a gift from God.

They'll save a lot of money because they won't need to buy expensive feed for the cattle.

For the chiltepín harvester, and there are 500 of us here in this region, every day the town of Mazocahui receives between 200 and 500 liters of chiltepíns during the month of October, November and December.

When you start working with this chile, they eyes, skin, hands, but mostly the fingers burn.

It's hard to even sleep at night.

But after three days of getting used to the chiles, the body somehow develops a resistance.

It adapts to the chiltepín.

The dryness of the region has an explanation, hasn't it?

Oh, yeah, we're in the rain shadow between two big ranges that take most of the moisture out.

It has pine trees on top and that means that there is some rainfall on the Sierra.

So they get one-fifth as much rain down here as they'll get up on the top.

But that's also why there's the Rio Sonora because it catches all that rain and it filters down into the groundwater.

For a desert dweller like me that was born in Hermosillo just at the fringe of the desert, water means life.

And you really cherish every drop of water.

And Rio Sonora embodies our culture.

We always think in terms of water, in terms of shade in a way of protecting from the heat.

Rio Sonora is the source of life for everyone in the desert.

Despite the fact that most people live in the desert don't realize that.

By the way, here's Odope.

The Rio Sonora is what we can call a truly Sonoran Desert river.

Most of the Sonora River is within the boundaries of the Sonoran Desert.

The sources of the Sonora River can be traced up in the Sierra new Cananea.

However, the place where the Sonora River ends is very difficult to find.

There are many, many different branches that go into the sea and each of them marks a different flooding episode because the river was able to make it to the sea.

There are three kinds of floods in the Sonoran Desert.

The summer thunderstorms can bring very fast rains.

Without warning you can get flash floods that can take out cars, take out people, people on horses, and bridges.

Those are the most dangerous ones.

Another one comes in wintertime, which is more gentle, and people usually have time to prepare for those kinds of floods and they may get a quarter of a mile wide in the Rio Sonora.

They're gentle but they may last for days.

The third kind is an autumn hurricane, which is unexpected but can come up very fast and take away huge ditches, take away trees, but goes down very quickly after it's done.

Well, Alberto, my friend, it is with heavy heart that I pronounce us to be entering the town of Baviacora where I know that you have to go elsewhere.

Yes I have to part way here at Baviacora because I am going to buy some sombreros, as I told you, off in Sierra Madre.

This was a very prosperous town when the Spaniards arrived.

Ah, look, here's the plaza with one of the wierdest churches you're gonna see in all of Mexico.

They didn't hurt for money.

This is a classic example of mixed architecture.

Well, Alberto, I know you have to leave so I guess in Baviacora's a good place to part if any.

Thanks for a great trip.

Thank you very much, David.

I leave with sorrow but your trip will be great.

Well, I'll say hello to everybody for you in Huepac.

See you then.

Poor Alberto.

Just a few kilometers up the road is the Chile Colorado he wanted to see.

For thousands of years it has been a staple of the Mexican diet but only recently has it become a cash crop along the Rio Sonora.

[Spanish] Well, they have a special name for these.

They're called college chiles but everybody really refers to em as just good old red chiles.

This tastes very much like a red pepper.

It's not at all hot.

It doesn't have that.

It has a good flavor but it doesn't bite like the chiltepíns bite.

It takes about seven kilos of chiles to make up one kilo of ground dried chile powder.

Sometimes you need to get this chile powder double bagged.

If it breaks while you're on route, you'll be sneezing chile powder for the next 30 years.

When the Spaniards arrived in the Rio Sonora in the 17th century, it was already a highly developed culture.

The Ópata people lived here and built two story stone houses.

The Opatas are gone but they left behind towns with magical names like Baviacora, Aconchi, Huepac, Banamichi, Sinoquipe and finally Arizpe.

[Spanish] So the name Arizpe actually means the place of mean fierce brave ants.

The original miners here in Arizpe arrived at about the same time as the Jesuit missionaries.

[Spanish] So primarily of silver, gold and copper in those days.

[Spanish] The Rio Sonora is a small desert river.

Land available for irrigation is limited.

So big time commercial agriculture never made inroads into the valley.

The land holdings are numerous and small.

As a result, the villages are egalitarian and prosperous.

And they retain their ancient beauty and charm that each year attract more and more visitors to the valley of the Rio Sonora.

Bats have been around for tens of millions of years, much longer than humans.

We have left our marks on the landscape much more than bats.

Because of the hours they keep, bats are mostly out of sight and out of mind.

But in hand, a bat is full of surprises and questions.

Next time on The Desert Speaks.

At times, especially during heavy winter rains, the Rio Sonora here at Achonchi can run as much as a quarter of a mile wide.

It's impossible then for vehicles to get across the Rio Sonora.

The only way of access to San Philippe and the hot springs of Achonchi is across this foot bridge.

And you can't take mules or horses across it.

It's restricted to pedestrians crossing the Rio Sonora.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

Representing concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of deserts.

And by The Stonewall Foundation.

Copies of the Desert Speaks are available from KUAT.

Please mention the episode number when ordering.

For more information visit the Desert Speaks online at this address.