Some people bring home a T-shirt from a trip. I bring home food. These are the souvenirs I brought home from a recent visit to Tucson: tepary beans, dried cholla buds, ground chiltepin peppers, White Sonora wheat berries, White Sonora everything bagels, three heritage flours, five breads made with those flours, corn and flour tortillas, prickly pear syrup, and just-fermented miso made from oak-roasted squash.
Recognized as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy for its culinary traditions, Tucson boasts the remains of irrigation canals built by the Hohokam people over 4,000 ago. An hour north of the Mexican border, the Sonoran Desert is surprisingly verdant. I was visiting in winter, but during summer monsoons even the parched Santa Cruz River overflows. Indigenous people have lived here for more than 15,000 years, foraging, hunting, and eventually cultivating crops including corn, beans, and squash. The Spanish arrived in the 1500s, and until 1854 the area belonged to Mexico. Over subsequent generations, Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo traditions have intertwined to create an outstanding food culture.
I had come to partake. At James Beard award winner El Güero Canelo, I devoured Sonoran hot dogs, which are wrapped in bacon and draped in beans, tomatoes, and onions. I ate carne seca at El Charro, the country’s oldest Mexican restaurant, and grilled breakfast burritos at Barista del Barrio. I slurped down Seis Kitchen’s prickly pear agua fresca, polished off jackfruit “carnitas” at vegetarian Tumerico, and sipped single malt whiskey smoked over mesquite fire at Whiskey del Bac. I went on a shopping spree at Barrio Bread, where owner Don Guerra bakes with White Sonora wheat, the Spanish mission grain he worked with local groups and nonprofits to revive. In the evenings I dined at upscale restaurants like Tito & Pep, where shrimp from the Sea of Cortez share a broth with masa dumplings, and the Sonoran Italian spot Zio Peppe, whose version of vodka sauce is made with tequila instead. At the farm-to-table restaurant Bata, I feasted on mushrooms in kosho, a fermented condiment made with chiles and preserved citrus; carnitas with poblano and sweet potato miso; and smoked pumpkin sorbet.
In between I walked with farmers, foragers, and botanists who told me more about the borderland flavors I tasted. I started at Mission Garden, a living agricultural museum on the remains of a Spanish colonial mission. The garden is established at the site of a Tohono O’odham village, named after the soil at the foot of Sentinel Peak: “Black Base,” or, in Tohono O’odham, “Cuk on,” from which we get “Tucson.”
Claire Hong, the docent, showed me around. As we walked and talked, she pointed out three gardens: One was in the Mexican milpa style; another was like those of the Chinese workers who laid the railroad and stayed to become farmers; and the last represented Africa in the Americas, beginning with the Moors who arrived from Spain. Field-tripping schoolkids explored indigenous crops (green-striped cushaw squash, copper-colored chapalote corn) or chased one another beneath quince and citrus trees brought by Spaniards. “There are a lot of voices to capture,” Hong told me. “We’re representing the Indigenous perspective, but Spanish colonialism is part of our history too. So this is a complex space.”
I witnessed that complexity in action on the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation, just south of the city. There the White Dove of the Desert, the 1767 Mission San Xavier del Bac, spreads its gleaming Moorish- and Byzantine-style wings. I marveled at its frescoes, but my destination was next door, the 860-acre San Xavier Co-op Farm, where visitors can shop for Tohono O’odham foods and crafts.
“We’ve always farmed beans, corn, and squash,” said Amy Juan, the farm’s young Tohono O’odham administrator, “but this community is heavily influenced by the missionaries, so there are also introduced foods like figs and melons.” We watched egrets wade in puddles left over from irrigating alfalfa, grown to feed the livestock also introduced by missionaries. The scene embodied Tohono O’odham determination; after industry and urbanization depleted the Santa Cruz River farther upstream, the Nation won a lawsuit over its water rights in 1982. By then, many had left farming. “We weren’t eating traditional foods,” she said. “Generations of Tohono O’odham kids never knew what tepary beans tasted like.” On a reservation the size of Connecticut with a single grocery store, her mission is reviving Native foods and creating food security. “How do we bring our foods with us into the future?” Juan asked. The farm trains Tohono O’odham foragers, who can sell their finds to the farm, which preserves them as dried goods and prepared foods.
