This week on Arizona illustrated the making of an all-American gymnast.

The team culture is really special here.

We have a group of girls that really want to be here and make the program better.

We meet some of the people behind the beer in Tucson's growing brewery scene.

It can go wrong at any step, any any point in the process.

So honestly, sometimes we call ourselves glorified janitors.

80% of our job is cleaning and sanitizing, using art where words fail and addressing the way we feel about our changing environment.

Why do we have to have everything and the outdoors be a competition to sort of drive that narrative?

That American culture is based on a dog eat dog, and that's not even true.

The natural world thrives on mutualism and symbiosis just as much as it does competition Hello and welcome to another all new episode of Arizona.

Illustrate and I'm Tom McNamara.

Last year, gymnast Sirena Linton was named University of Arizona Athletics Junior of the Year.

In this episode, she discusses what it's like to be a first generation Mexican-American student athlete, a member of the LGBTQ plus community, and an NCAA all-American [music] (Sirena) When I was young, my parents just threw me in.

They wanted to get me out of the house because I jumped around like a like a monkey.

And I was just climbing on walls and I was able to, like, get out my energy that way as a kid.

And I really just fell in love with it and I stuck with it ever since.

(Taylor) Sirena's freshman year was 2020.

I officially met her in 2019.

I went to recruit her at her home gym, and the first time I saw her, I just knew that I wanted that routine.

(Sirena) It's been really interesting, especially earning like a full ride academic scholarship, not having a lot of people who have been in my shoes before, in my family.

And so it's been really something that I've had to navigate and pave my own path for.

(Taylor) The team culture is really special here.

We have a group of girls that really want to be here and make the program better.

(Sirena) Regardless of where we all come from, we're able to come together and really set out a goal and go achieve it.

It's like a sisterhood and it's a family.

(Gymnastics team) Bear down!

(Sirena) It was a shock to just be here in general and to get a spot on the team.

I came in as a walk on and I really just earned my way here.

(Taylor) Something that makes Sirena excellent at what she does is her attention to detail.

She's just consistently wanting to get better.

(Sirena) My brother definitely inspires me.

He passed away at the end of my sophomore year and that was just a turning point for me.

It was definitely a really hard thing for me and my family.

I'm not going to lie.

It was a struggle I had many times where I just wanted to redshirt.

I wanted to quit.

I didn't want to go to class.

I couldn't even get out of bed just from grieving.

I had to also remind myself what my brother stood for and use that as motivation to get myself out of bed, taking things day by day and just being able to say, I just made it here.

I made it into the gym was like a win for me every single day.

Was just like a little bit more.

A little bit more, a little bit more.

He's just a really strong soul that I've always looked up to.

(Taylor) Sirena has grown tremendously over the past few seasons.

I think she's really come into her own and become more comfortable leading leading by example, you know, leading by voice in the gym.

She's really good at keeping everyone together, and I think that she has a bright future ahead.

(Taylor coaching) Come on Sirena.

Walk out the back like a little bit more on the second back handspring.

(Sirena) So I'm like training in the gym with Taylor and I'm looking at the wall with her on it.

I'm like, I want to be right next to you, Taylor.

And she's like, You got to get All American.

Like, Well, we got to get All American.

(Taylor coaching) You listen, though.

You listen to what I said because I didn't want you to try and stick and go small and be here.

So that was better.

(Sirena) From then, I just worked really hard and kept giving that little 1% every single day.

I had a really great season.

Went to regionals.

I set my sights out for that top spot because that top spot was going to get me to nationals.

And obviously focusing on my team, still focusing on our success.

(ESPN announcer) This is an exciting moment for Sirena.

It really is, it's her only opportunity qualified as a specialist on this event.

(Sirena) I think it's one thing to qualify to the national championships and it's another to do well and to be able to show what I worked really hard for.

And it was really important for me to go and represent, you know, not only Mexican-Americans, but, you know, first gen, students of color, LGBT communities.

And I remember shaking all over the place.

My warmups were not good.

I was falling off super nervous just because I'm on the national stage.

And right before I competed, my coach came up to me and he said, Remember what you've been training all this year for and immediately thought of my brother.

Went up, hit my routine, nailed it.

(ESPN announcer) Good showing for her on her special event.

So exciting!

Oh, I love that.

(Taylor) And she ended up becoming an All-American.

So she has a picture on the wall now.

(Sirena) It really came full circle for me.

And from then I was like, Well, I made it.

So now what's next?

(Announcer) Sirena Linton!

(Sirena) My goal ultimately is to not only go back, but to bring my team.

I walk in the gym every day and I, you know, encourage uplift with my teammates and say, you know, we've got to get here.

We all have to.

Something that my coach asked me at the end of last season was, What are you most proud of?

They expected me to say, Oh, All American national championships.

And I looked at them and I said, like, I'm proud that we hosted our first pride meet.

and hosted the first like Diversity Inclusion, LGBTQ themed competition, because we're one of maybe like three or four schools who have ever done that.

Being an advocate and representing those who want to be in my position, that's been what's special to me and that's been my biggest accomplishment.

And I just hope that I can continue to do that.

For this We wish Sirena and the gymnastics team all the best this season.

Now to the next installment of our Field Notes series.

Producer David Forster takes us all the way to his own backyard for a look at one of the world's stinkiest plants.

Stippling or gigantism?

Also known as the corpse or carrion flower A couple of years ago my friend Bill gave me this cutting.

I planted it in the backyard and it quickly spread.

In the early fall, twisted forms emerged and eventually opened into these flowers.

I don't know exactly how I would describe their smell, but most people agree it's offputting or even disgusting.

To me, it was like a musty, rotting cheese.

They're part of a group of flowers, informally called carrion or corpse flowers.

Their scent is said to imitate rotting flesh, which attracts mostly flies and beetles which pollinate the flower.

While most of the plants in my garden are native to the Sonoran Desert this plant is from South Africa originally.

Its Latin name is Stapelia gigantea I don't know what it says about me, but I like how the flowers smell.

And I'd like to add different kinds of corpse flowers to my garden.

It's also fun to watch people's expressions the first time they inhale the particular fragrance of these blossoms.

With the recent explosion in the craft beer industry.

The city of Tucson is now home to more than 20 breweries In recent decades, that business has been male dominated.

But we went to Borderlands Brewery, where the head brewers are female.

So they talked to us about the joys and challenges of their job and remind us that women have a long history of beer making, dating all the way back to the Middle Ages.

(Ayla) A brew day starts typically pretty early in the morning.

I will wake up at maybe 5:30 or 6, get here by 6:30 or 7, and every day is different, especially on a brew day.

We'll get in bright and early and I will stare at the two thousand pounds of grain that I have to mill in, which is always fun.

It's good to have a little workout early in the morning, so maybe at 6:30 in the morning I'll start for an hour by milling in 55 pound bags of grain.

We are multitaskers, so we might be brewing while washing kegs, while building an order to go out for distribution all throughout the state.

My job is really to put out fires.

My name is Ayla Kapahi.

I am the head brewer and director of production for Borderlands Brewing Company.

We are currently in the Borderlands Brewing Production space where all of the beer is brewed.

The way I learned to brew professionally was through an apprenticeship with a brewery in Tucson Public Brewhouse.

I was the first woman to brew for Borderlands Brewing when we moved into our new production facility here.

We actually opened Arizona's first all women's production facility in 2019.

My name is Savanna Soldate.

I don't have any degree in any brewing sciences, but everything we do is learned here and trained on site.

I've always thought that I would never like beer.

The first time I ever tried a beer, I was like, This is disgusting.

How can anybody drink this?

But obviously it's an acquired taste, just like anything.

But for the most part, I almost exclusively drink beer.

I started bartending.

Craft beer from bartending.

I moved more into back of house things, everything from cleaning kegs, putting orders together, cleaning the tanks all the way to at this point, to brewing the beer (Ayla) First.

Your beer is brewed on one day.

(Savanna) Making beer is kind of like brewing tea or making oatmeal.

You take raw ingredients, you steep them.

Basically, you add hot water to them.

You extract all those sugars, those proteins.

You strain that from the raw materials that you use.

So you just have a liquid base.

You boil that liquid and some of the water will evaporate depending on what you want the alcohol content of your beer, the boil matters, but also the boil matters for adding bittering hops.

After the boil, we cool the beer down to an optimal temperature for the yeast that we're using.

At that point.

The yeast does a lot of the work Turns the sugar water into the alcohol.

Final step is separating the yeast out from the clean beer.

It's called bright beer.

Clean beer.

And then we keg it.

Can it package it and distribute it all the stores or sell it through our taprooms.

(Ayla) [laughing] I'm laughing because it can go wrong at any step and any point in the process.

So honestly, sometimes we call ourselves glorified janitors.

80% of our job is cleaning and sanitizing because until the alcohol is created in the beer, the beer is very fragile.

You could brew the best beer in the world, but if it goes into a vessel that's not cleaned properly or a keg that's not washed properly, or even if it's dispensed on a line on a beer line, a tap line that's not clean, it can really alter your product.

So now we're going to taste the final product of our beer.

It's been fermenting for almost two weeks.

It's fully carbonated.

You can see how it has quite a bit of carbonation there.

The first pour has quite a bit of foam.

We're going to give it a smell.

Mm.

You can really smell those cocoa nibs that we put in the beer and the toasted coconut.

Beautiful aroma.

Nice body and mouth feel has a very medium to heavy mouthfeel.

It's going to be perfect for the holidays.

The industry is very supportive of women and minorities who are pursuing careers in production.

When you're a woman in the beer industry, there's other subtle things that happen.

There's something about not seeing people who look like you in the industry, and that can make you second guess yourself.

That certainly happened to me when Savanna who's our lead brewer, started with me about four years ago.

One thing she said to me was, I'm so grateful for this opportunity to learn brewing from another woman.

That was the first time I heard something like that before because of course, in my experience almost a decade ago, that was never an option.

Women are actually the original brewers of beer.

They were home brewers and they were secretly selling their beer to the public.

They advertised it in the way of wearing these pointy hats, which folks depicted as witch hats.

There started to become this culture of witch women brewers fast forward, maybe especially to the last 50 years, home brewing has been dominated by men.

A lot of folks have the slogan that say the future of beer is female.

A lot of us women, we are saying, no, we are taking this title and this culture back (Savanna) I really like everything about it.

I like that it's physical, but I like that it's creative.

We have a lot of creative liberty in the beers that we make.

It's a little bit scientific.

We're making recipes.

We have to do water chemistry.

It's very satisfying, honestly, seeing the final product and knowing that you milled the grain in.

That started it.

(Customer) Thank you.

(Savanna) Sometimes when I sit at the taproom and people are like, Oh, this beer is so amazing.

And I'm like, Yes.

Like, it is a very gratifying feeling.

Anthropocene is a term used to describe a unit of time where human activity has greatly impacted the Earth's climate and ecosystems.

As we experience more frequent and unpredictable weather patterns and as species become extinct at a faster rate, the feelings that triggers can be daunting and alien.

Where words fail, art has provided a means to process and communicate (Nika) We're in this defunct quarry just beneath Sentinel Peak, which many people know as "A" mountain.

The quarry was established in the 1880s to extract lava rock, to build the foundations for a lot of the buildings in the downtown area.

It's such an interesting place in that it's been repurposed, and yet it has this intrinsic colonial history of extraction.

My work often deals with the relationship between humans and our interdependence with the rest of the world, and imagines different scenarios in which those interdependent relationships might take shape in the present and the future.

I received a grant in 2020 to create an experimental film that takes place in Glen Canyon and imagines this post-human future after Lake Powell, which is imminently evaporating in the present.

And it imagines this post-human future in which all of the different species that were drowned in the damming of Glen Canyon reemerge in these calcified, ghostlike forms .

My work like a space of offering time and sensation to cultivate a cushion for grief.

But I think what happens when we accept grief is that we can then imagine that intensity and transmute it into anger, revolutionary action, or the states of coming together in commune with one another.

(Erica) We are in Gates Pass which is adjacent to Saguaro National Park.

I think a lot of times visitors might not be aware that they are actually in habitat and that there are a lot of different evolutionary processes happening around them, including but not limited to extinction, and that there's a lot of really amazing flourishing mutualistic relationships going on.

I trained as a ballet dancer since I was about five, and I'm really comfortable sort of embodying these magical more than human characters, like a lot of classical ballet.

And I work in conservation.

I'm an environmental organizer.

And I thought art and science and activism, those things coming together are really powerful.

And my projects focus on biodiversity, highlighting different species that are threatened or endangered.

So exploring how is the biodiversity of this place affected by light noise, pollution, human presence, development?

All of those things impacts wildlife, the ability to survive and to thrive.

I'm hoping that when people watch the things that I do, when I'm performing, then maybe it leads them to think about what extinctions are happening in their backyard.

(Nika) I think the discourse around climate change for a long time was about our individual responsibility and having these other deeply systemic issues, namely capitalism and colonialism, that are perpetuating this unraveling.

We're starting to talk a little bit more about that, but I think we're also at a moment of imagining our interdependence in a much deeper way as we see all of this unraveling take place.

But at its core, the problem has been placing that onus on us as individuals when we are actually the recipients of these systemic problems.

(Erica) Somewhat frequently, you're seeing all these emerging studies that we've lost 70 to 80% of wild animals since the early seventies.

This desert is what it is because of its exact temperature and precipitation.

So whenever we have these huge fires that sweep through this landscape and buffel grass takes root, the saguaro aren't coming back.

And so it's a cascade of events that lead to either little local extinctions or across the whole Sonoran Desert or whatever ecosystem we're talking about.

(Nika) As climate change perpetuates its course, we're going to inevitably become more aware of our relationship to the natural world and to other species.

(Erica) How does a human move in a landscape that feels organic and like a little bit more primal?

We get really stuck in our experiences outside.

So like so-and-so has hiked the Arizona Trail the fastest.

I'm like, What about the slowest?

Why do we have to have everything and the outdoors be a competition?

Just sort of drives that narrative that American culture is based on a dog eat dog, and that's not even true.

The natural world thrives on mutualism and symbiosis just as much as it does competition.

And so I'm very interested in the desert tortoise.

They've been here for over 50 million years.

What wisdom can we take away as humans when we are also thinking about how are we going to adapt and survive?

I think it's devastating for our own species to think that we're the smartest ones out here.

And it also is kind of a bummer to think about how a tortoise has such resiliency and adaptation to make it this far.

And right now it's listed federally as threatened because of human development.

Like, what does that say about us?

(Nika) There are all of these structural value systems that are given to the way that climate change is conveyed to us through the news, and there is no value to numerical structures.

And what art can do is represent all of that energetic experience that exists outside of that information, offering us a space to think about what we're actually feeling through this rather than projecting anxiety into the future.

What I think engaging with art and creative expression can do is situate you in this ever evolving present as a way to think in a deeper and more expansive way about what the possibilities for futures look like outside of capitalism perpetuating climate change.

(Erica) It's scary because when you love something, that's what grief is.

In our society, we don't even slow down enough to check in and see how we're feeling about things as heavy as the Anthropocene and climate change.

And I think that the creative process is an act of resistance because some forces want to wear you down.

Some forces are expecting you to get exhausted.

that'll do it for this episode of Arizona Illustrated.

But before we go, here's a sneak peek at a few stories.

We're working on another 14 inch telescope in one of our observatories and then several personal telescopes.

I'm going to have about six telescopes operating tonight oh, yeah.

You go looking for first time.

We never saw it so when people look at our telescopes, especially if they're looking at something that should elicit a response, we're looking for something like an Oh, wow, or, you know, oh, my God.

Or something like that.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Wow.

My name is Laura Markowitz.

I've been a contributing producer for Arizona Public Media for about 13 years.

The children of the Holocaust Stories of Survival Project was inspired by the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust.

And that first aired in September, Arizona Public Media sponsored two live public events in which Holocaust survivors were invited to speak.

And that kind of got the ball rolling.

So when this opportunity came up, I was extremely, you know, interested because I also feel like in our society right now, there's a resurgence of a lot of ideas that were popular when Hitler came to power.

So, you know, the old saying that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it I just hope that if children are going to listen to this or watch this, that they would think about how life can change on a drop of a pin not a lot people in Tucson know about what Holocaust can mean.

You don't have a country if you don't have history.

And if you don't teach history.

And it seems that this what is happening over here today is incredible.

That's an incredible thing to me.

My task was to reach out to Jewish Family and Children's Services.

They're a local nonprofit agency here in Tucson.

I went to their support group, introduce myself and introduce the project and asked if anybody wanted to tell their stories and be recorded.

Thank you for joining us.

Here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week with another episode of all new stories.