Collection: The best of Big Jim Griffith's blog, “Our Storied Desert Land”

Go to any Mexican restaurant in Tucson and look over the menu. Breakfast and sweets aside, you’d be hard put to find many dishes that don’t include beef or wheat. It’s the same in Sonoran home cooking too, and it’s been that way ever since March of 1687, when Kino came into this region with his wheat seeds and beef cattle.

Let’s take a look, starting with beef.

Of course the regular bits of the cow get used — grilled as carne asada, chopped up in a red chile sauce as carne de chile colorado, and on. In fact, Sonora is supposed to have been described by a Mexico City politicianas “el lugar donde empieza la carne asada y termina le civilización” (“The place where carne asada begins and civilization ends”).

Thin strips of beef get dried and become carne seca or jerky, or shredded and dried into machaca which can then be cooked up with bits of tomato, chili, onions and garlic.

But it can honestly be said that in Sonora they cook just about every part of the cow except for the moo. Beef cheeks — cabezas — are a popular taco filling, available in a couple of places on our southwest side of Tucson.

Tripas de leche or marrow guts are a favorite picnic food for grilling. To do it right takes a long time over a slow fire. When done you chop them into small pieces, just as one does with carne asada, and eat them with a flour tortilla and some salsa.

And then there are the wonderful Sonoran soups or caldos, many of which begin with beef stock. Caldo de queso has potatoes, tomatoes, green chiles, onion, garlic and melted cheese. Cazuela has many of the same vegetables, with carne seca. There’s cocido, with oxtail, beef skirt, the usual veggies, and garbanzos and bits of corn cob. Albóndigas are meatballs in broth. And then there’s menudo.

Menudo is tripe soup with hominy and cow’s knuckles. It is a rich stew, and many restaurants only offer it on weekends, when families can get together for breakfast. It comes in a rich broth and is usually served with garnishes of chiltepín peppers, lemon quarters, chopped green onion, and cilantro. Many restaurants also serve it with the Mexican rolls called pan birrote.

But that’s not all about menudo. It is said to be an excellent hangover recipe (on the principal of putting more stomach in your stomach?) and is one of the foods about which one can joke. When asked about menudo by a curious tourist, one of my friends replied “Why, Ma’am, it’s just cow guts and popcorn.”

It all began when the Sonoran Desert started drying up, to become what it is today.

As the surface water slowly disappeared, the trout that lived in our rivers, and especially in the Santa Cruz, began to evolve in order to live in their new world. Their gills were replaced by lungs and their eyes grew on stalks, thus allowing them to both breathe and see in their new environment.

Swimming through the sands of the waterless rivers, they would scan the surface in order to catch the insects and small reptiles on which they fed. In the process, they also became one of North America’s most challenging game fish.

Consider the situation: the trout could see as well as any other surface-dwelling animal. Therefore it was useless to walk through the sand, casting your line. And because swimming through the hot sand in the daytime can be a painful experience, the sand trout would never move very far for its meal.

Finally, some unsung genius hit upon the Horny Toad Solution. One catches a horned toad, ties a leader around its belly just behind its front legs, and lets it loose to scamper down the river. The trout sees it coming, opens its mouth, and GLOMP! swallows the repile. A sharp jerk on the line sets the critter’s spikes in the fish’s mouth, and there you are!

Non-sporting (or very hungry) fishermen discovered that if you haul the trout in hand over hand, the friction of the sands will have it skinned and cooked by the time it reaches the shore.

Of course there’s a caveat here. Horny Toads are a protected species. However, there are no laws against taking them for little walks in the desert. It’s an argument for catch-and-release fishing, but in this case, you catch the fish and release the bait.

For those camp cooks who are reading this, here’s my favorite recipe. Mix a marinade of five parts tequila, three parts lime juice, one part chili powder (Santa Cruz brand, of course) and a tablespoon of salt. Soak the sand trout in the marinade for twelve hours, at the end of which you feed the fish to the dogs and drink the marinade.

Now, I’ve been writing this in the present tense, but the sad fact is that our population of sand trout has been seriously depleted. Most were drowned in the floods of 1983.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Like every teller of tall tales, I reserve the right to add my own details. In these cases and in these cases only I violate the Folklorist’s Rule by not telling it exactly the way I heard it.

You see them all over town, and in the surrounding countryside on both sides of the border. Their numbers are growing, and they've been here for over two hundred years. They are one of the visible traditions that tie us to our past.

What are they? Roadside death markers.

Small piles of rocks can be seen beside the ancient trails that can still be followed in this desert country. We assume they are shrines or offerings of some sort but their exact significance must remain a mystery.

However, the custom of planting a cross at the site of a sudden death came with the Spaniards. The message is simple: This is where someone died without the preparation afforded by the Catholic Church. If you wish, you may pray for his or her soul.

That the custom was well established in our region, we know from a 1783 letter from an official in the Sonoran colonial government, quoting a conversation with Fray Antonio de los Reyes, the first bishop of Sonora.

The good bishop was concerned about the custom of planting a cross wherever a traveler had been killed by the Apaches. It cheapened the holy symbol of the cross, he said, and even exposed it to acts of irreverence. Furthermore it so frightened travelers that they might be too terrified to defend themselves in case of a real attack. Finally, it would only encourage the Apaches to further depredations.

For these reasons, Bishop Reyes asked the authorities to remove all the crosses and order that no further markers be erected. This was duly accomplished.

As we can see today, it didn’t work.

Nowadays the internal combustion engine has replaced Apache warriors as the primary cause of roadside death, but the crosses are still here. There was even a time in the 1950s that they were erected by the Arizona Highway Department as a warning strategy for motorists. However, the crosses we see nowadays are usually placed by grieving friends and relatives . . . I suspect as a way of doing something to ease the pain of loss.

The latest manifestation of this old, old custom may be found in the “ghost bikes” placed by members of the cycling community to commemorate the traffic death of a fellow bike rider. These stark reminders are painted white and equipped with the name and dates of the deceased. Flowers are often placed nearby on the ground. I drove past a ghost bike today at the southeast corner of Mission Road and Irvington.

But be they bikes, crosses, or some other symbol, these public reminders of tragedy seem to be meaningful to an increasing number of people here in our desert.

Chiltepines are tiny, red, fiery-hot chiles. In Sonora, some farmers cultivate them, but they also grow wild in the hills of Arizona and northern Sonora. In fact there's an official wild chiltepin preserve in the mountains west of Tumacacori and Tubac.

They can be picked green and preserved in vinegar or allowed to ripen to a nice red and then dried. Writing in the late 18th century, Father Ignatz Pfefferkorn informs us that people would crumble the fried chiles between their fingers, and add them to soups and stews. That's what I use chiltepines for; I scatter the powder very sparingly on my Saturday morning bowl of menudo. But I don't use my fingers. Those things are hotter than a two-bit pistol in a range war.

One can get chiltepin plants at places such as Desert Survivors in Tucson, and the seeds at Native Seeds/SEARCH. But the seeds are hard to get started. In the wild, they are eaten and then eliminated by birds, which scores their outer skin. In fact, one local botanist, when I asked him how to grow chiltepines from seed, advised me to “run them through a bird first.”

While on that subject, I might add that I have been told that a chiltepin patch is the only place where the birds are known to fly backward into a high wind.

In recent years chiltepin grinders have appeared on the Sonoran crafts scene. These are small mortar-and-pestle sets, carved out of mesquite or ironwood with a hole in the mortar about the thickness of a pencil and grooves on the end of the long pestle. The easiest place to find them is at the curio booths and fruit stands in and near near Magdalena, Sonora. The grinders come in all shapes, always with a hole at the top: saguaros, owls, barrels, what you will.

The most spectacular one I've seen was on the plaza in Magdalena. It was made from ironwood, and was in the shape of a hand grenade. The top of the pestle was carved to resemble a rattlesnake's rattles. I didn't buy it, and have been kicking myself ever since!

A remarkable historical project is developing at the foot of Sentinel Peak (or “A” Mountain, if you prefer) — The Mission Garden. It’s a wonderful example of what can be done by a small group of hard-working visionaries.

It occupies a walled, four-acre enclosure on the site of the original garden, and when it’s finished, it will be a kind of living agricultural history of Tucson.

Right now it consists of several components. There’s a group of “waffle beds” containing a rainy-season garden stocked with historic Hohokam and traditional O’odham rain-fed crops. Next to this summer garden is an orchard containing 121 authenticated heritage trees, including figs, pomegranates, quinces, apricots, and plums, and 28 Mission grapevines — all bearing just now.

This is to a great extent the work of a visionary ethnobotanist named Jesús García. He traveled the borderlands, searching for old trees and vines that had been themselves grown from cuttings. When I first saw this orchard, it was a collection of dry-looking sticks; now the trees are in full leaf and loaded with fruit. No surprise there — the orchard supervisor is retired UA arborist Libby Davison.

Finally, ancient varieties of corn and beans are being planted in the Early Agricultural area. These plots are based on the gardens that were excavated at an archaeological site near Marana, pushing back the date of agriculture in the Santa Cruz Valley several thousand years. And this is just the beginning; more historic gardens and crops are in the planning stage.

Why am I telling you all this just now? Partly because this is Tucson’s birthday month, and mostly because the gardens are now open to visitors on Saturdays from 8 a.m. until noon. Come and see them — they are our past.

And in a sense, they are our future as well. Our community is full of small, carefully-researched, ”do-it-yourself “ projects like this, many operating on a shoestring, but each adding to our understanding of our community. I’ll be telling you about more as we go along.

This one was planned to be part of a much larger, city-funded “Tucson’s Birthplace” project, and when the big bucks disappeared, the believers took over and, by golly, made it happen. That’s Tucson.

The project is sponsored by a group called “the Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace," and they are hosting a fund-raising breakfast at the Mercado San Agustin, on Sunday, Aug. 25 from 7-10 a.m., with tours of the garden available all morning. Delicious (trust me) regional food will be served. For further information call (520) 777-9270, or e-mail at missiongarden.tucson@gmail.com.

And while you’re at it, check out “Father Kino’s Orchard” down at Tumacacori National Historical Park. It’s also Jesús García’s work!

I’ve got a wonderful word for you – péchita. That’s the purely regional name for mesquite beans, and it comes from the Opata language. In Texas or New Mexico they know about mesquite beans, but they call them something else. “Péchita” is strictly ours.

If you have access to several mesquite trees, chew on a pod from each one to select the sweetest, as this quality varies from tree to tree. Then, if you want a cool, refreshing summer drink, grind the dry pods (not the beans) in your food processor, and add water, ice and sweetener if needed. This is an ancient delicacy hereabouts, and it’s worth trying. You can make it thin like a drink, or thick like an atole as you wish.

Mesquite is coming into popularity as a source of flour. If you have lots of pods, you can take them to Desert Harvesters, a local outfit, and get them ground for you. Look them up on their website for details, including their schedules. They only grind on certain days.

Otherwise, you can buy mesquite flour locally. The organization Native Seeds/SEARCH is located on North Campbell and sells a four-ounce packet of mesquite meal for four dollars (I’ll write more about this wonderful organization later on).

There are lots of good recipes for mesquite flour that you can find through an Internet search. I use this flour in pancakes, waffles, breads, and even biscuits, mixing it in with wheat flour.

There’s even a local company – Tortillería Arevalo – that makes and sells tortillas de péchita – they are sweet, with an unusual flavor. They often appear at local farmers’ market, which is nice, as their headquarters is on the far, far West Side.

Where there is a mesquite tree you can be sure to enjoy the offerings of this plant. Just don’t leave our region and start talking about péchita – they won’t understand you!

Let’s start with a river – The Santa Cruz River. We have to start there, because that’s where human settlement in this area started.

This is a desert. No water, no people. And up to little more than a hundred years ago, the Santa Cruz was not the deep, dry ditch we see today (except when it has rained in the Santa Ritas, but that’s another story). It was a shallow, intermittent stream partly underground and partly on the surface.

It was along the surface-flowing parts that people started living and growing crops a long time ago. How long? Recent archaeological studies suggest that people were planting corn along our stretch of the Santa Cruz as early as 4100 years ago (that’s 2100 BC). They were irrigating their crops by means of a complex system of canals by 1500 BC. This is the earliest canal irrigation so far found in North America.

From then on, the Santa Cruz was, for thousands of years, a vital source of water for agriculture.

At some time in the fairly recent past, a people who called themselves O’odham or “The People,” settled in a village at the foot of the hill we call “'A' Mountain” and they called “Black Mountain.” The village was called Chuk Shon, which tells us that it was at the foot Black Mountain.

Then in 1775, a Spanish cavalry outpost was founded across the Santa Cruz River from Chuk Shon. It was called Tucson (pronounced Tooksón) which was as close as the Spaniards could conveniently get to Chuk Shon. And here we are, all of us.

The river continued being an important water resource. O’odham, Spaniards, and, later, Mexicans all built ditches and irrigated their crops. In the late 19th Century there were even Chinese truck gardens along the river banks just north of "A" Mountain (or Sentinal Peak, as it was called then). But not for long.

Over-grazing, a lowered water table, and drought cycles led to severe down-cutting, and reduced the Santa Cruz to the deep, dry (but not always!) arroyo that we see today.

Next: Dry river stories

Tamales (the singular in Spanish is “tamal,” not “tamale”) are a link with Mexico’s ancient past. Tamales were made (and eaten!) in Mesoamerica long before Columbus found what he wasn’t looking for.

You take the corn dough (masa), add some kind of filling, wrap it in corn husks, and steam it. Every region in Mexico has its special tamales – there are beef tamales, chicken tamales, fish and shrimp tamales, and tamales made of blue corn meal. There are huge tamales and bite-sized tamales.

In southern Mexico the tamales are wrapped in banana leaves. I’ve always wanted to take a tamal tour of our sister republic to the south. It would be a truly broadening experience!

Here in our region, there are two major kinds of tamal – red ones, which are stuffed with meat and made especially at Christmas time, and green corn tamales, tamales de elote, which are traditionally summer fare. However, many restaurants, like Lerua’s on Broadway, for example, serve them in vast quantities all year round.

Unlike red tamales, which I’ll write about later in the year, green corn tamales are made from fresh white corn. One place to find the appropriate corn would be in one of the fruit and vegetable stands on the southwest side of town, like El Rey del Elote on South 12th.

You remove the husks from the cobs, and save them for later use, then slice off the kernels. Grind the kernels in a food processor or a manual grinder. (WARNING: This job has been known to burn out regular kitchen blenders.)

Take the resulting doughy mixture, and beat in some shortening and perhaps a little cottage cheese if the mixture is too dry. You can add some grated yellow cheese for flavor if you wish. Then take the fresh corn husks, smear the mixture on one side, and add a strip of cheese and a strip of roasted, peeled green chile. Wrap it up with the goo on the inside, fold over the ends, and steam it.

The results are light, sweet, fluffy, and delicious, and don’t really need any sauce other than a healthy appetite.

Any tamales left over from the initial pig-out may be frozen. There! I’ve made myself hungry again!

La Llorona is alive and well locally, even though we lack running water. I have known teenaged Chicanas who wouldn’t ride their horses in the dry bed of the Santa Cruz (a good galloping place, that) because “that scary lady” was there.

I have friends who claim to have heard her at night, and one friend who swears she saw her in the middle of a daytime dust storm in South Tucson. (“Centuries of tears had worn furrows down her cheeks.”)

And the La Llorona story had been given a distinctly Tucson twist. According to this version, a Tucson mother warned her little boy not to play in the dry washes because of flash floods. They happen all too often in the rainy season, and anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time runs a good danger of being swept away and drowned. That’s what happened to this particular boy. He died, and his mother, mad with grief still wanders the washes, looking for her lost son. As is always the case, any child will do.

From here on, things get a little surprising. About thirty years ago, I was giving a talk to a class of fairly active middle schoolers. I had just discovered that the VHS tape I had brought wouldn’t work in the school’s Beta machine. Chaos was starting to reign. Desperately, I said something like “I’m a folklorist. Folklorists study stories. Stories like La Llorona.” Instant silence.

“Who can tell me about La Llorona?” I asked. A forest of hands flew up. Confident that I knew what I was going to hear, I called on one Chicanita.

"She’s the girl who died in the girl’s washroom, and if you turn off the lights and say 'La Llorona, La Llorona, I believe in you' twenty times, she’ll come at you out of the mirror.” Gulp! Not what I had expected at all.

I knew the story of the girl in the mirror — she is all over the United States. But she is usually called Mary Jane or Mary Wales or Bloddy Mary. Here, on Tucson’s Southwest side, she’s La Llorona.

What’s the connection between the scary girl in the washroom and the scary lady on the riverbank? Potentially running water, apparently.

That same day another girl gave the formula as “La Llorona, La Llorona, you murdered your babies.” And one friend who remembers Bloody Mary stories from her childhood tells me that to make her appear you have to sprinkle water on the mirror.

Well, that’s folklore. It belongs to communities not individuals, it's constantly changing, and there’s is no “correct” version.

And I can’t leave it alone. Stay tuned.

November 2 is All Souls’ Day in the Catholic Church — the day set aside for remembrance of the dead. In Mexico it is “el día de los muertos,” or the Day of the Dead.

Here in Arizona and Sonora, it is a time for cleaning, refurbishing, and decorating the family graves, and for visiting with the departed. A day later, when all the living have finished with their tasks, and before the first rain, our smaller cemeteries blossom into fields of color, with quantities of real and artificial flowers. I’ll devote a whole blog to that later on.

It is only recently that the central and southern Mexican traditions of candy skulls, playful skeletons, and the like have really arrived on the border.

In 1984 I was visiting with a baker in Nogales, Sonora, who made pan de muerto — “bread of the dead.” These are rich loaves made especially for the Day of the Dead. In his case some were round with bones modeled on them, and some had a roughly human shape. He told me that when he arrived from near Mexico City in the 1950s people would ask him what the loaves were for. Nowadays pan del muerto is available in many bakeries in Tucson, as well as across the border. Often different bakeries create different styles, so it’s worth visiting around.

The bread is not the only aspect of the stereotypic Mexican Day of the Dead that has established itself, especially in Tucson. Art museums and other secular institutions put up Day of the Dead altar displays — there’s going to be one in Special Collections at the UA Library, for instance. Both the serious and the playful aspects of the central Mexican Day of the Dead have taken strong roots among middle-class Tucsonans of Mexican descent.

Thus one’s ancestors can be honored in two ways: literally, by remembering their names and cleaning their graves, and symbolically, by adopting and adapting symbolic elements of traditional Mexican culture.

The most recent and spectacular local manifestation of what has been called the Mexican cult of the dead is Tucson’s annual All Souls Procession. It began in 1990,with a local artist honoring the memory of her recently-deceased father with celebration and creativity. It grew from there, employing visual images from the Mexican holiday, until last year 35,000 people participated. It is a fascinating and exciting example of cross-cultural adaptation, and is deeply meaningful to many of its participants.

It’s been a while since we’re touched on one of my favorite subjects – food, so let’s take a look at a true regional specialty: enchiladas chatas sonorenses or Sonoran flat enchiladas. These are not to be confused with the flat or stacked enchiladas one can find in New Mexico and some places in Arizona, which are basically sauce-soaked tortillas stacked up with a filling – cheese or whatever – between them. Those are good eating indeed, but they are not what I’m writing about today.

“Enchilada” simply means something soaked in chile, and these enchiladas fill that bill readily. They are flat cakes of masa, sometimes with chile, cheese, white flour or grated potatoes mixed in, which are then fried and covered with red chile sauce. They can then be garnished with cheese, chopped olives, shredded lettuce, or chopped green onions. They appear on a lot of restaurant menus as “flat” or “Sonoran style” enchiladas.

They are similar to the fried masa cakes in other parts of Mexico called sopes, and to others called chalupas, but these are usually molded with a little rim to hold beans or other goodies.

My Tucson contemporaries tell me that, when they were growing up, any enchiladas prepared at home were Sonoran style. Over and over again, I hear that they first encountered rolled enchiladas when they went to local Mexican restaurants.

Incidentally, when I was googling around for this article, I encountered a lot of requests for the history of the enchilada – who invented the dish, where did it originate. You might as well ask for the history of the taco. (The history of the sandwich is easier; the 18th–Century Earl of Sandwich had his club prepare slices of beef between two slices of bread, so he wouldn’t have to leave the gambling table if he got hungry during an exciting game. The bread supposedly kept him from getting his fingers - and the cards - greasy. The dish doubtless existed long before that.)

However, nobody in Mexico was taking notes concerning what poor folks were eating, and the rolled enchilada is a no-brainer. The Sonoran enchilada is equally lost in the mists of popular culture. But it sure does eat easy!