Did you hear? One of Tucson’s most famous native children doesn’t live here anymore because she doesn’t like our “car culture.”
She also objects to the “Stalinist” new architecture downtown.
And of course there are the “exotic attitudes” here — by which she seems to mean the few conservative ones.
Linda Ronstadt, raised in Tucson but now a resident of San Francisco, can’t seem to stop talking smack about Tucson. Yes, her critical comments are couched in affection, especially for the rose-colored Tucson of her youth and for nearby northern Sonora.
But people keep asking her about this place where she hasn’t lived for more than a decade, and she keeps expounding on our home’s faults. One year it’s the strip malls she dislikes; another year it’s the dust. One year it’s the jet noise; another year it’s the chain stores. Tucson and Southern Arizona just can’t measure up to what they were in her apparently idyllic childhood.
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The latest instance occurred Aug. 16, when the Arizona Republic published a Q-and-A with Ronstadt. Writer Megan Finnerty had heard Ronstadt criticize Arizona on “The Diane Rehm Show,” which is broadcast across the country on National Public Radio stations, but the comment was at the end of the show and truncated. So Finnerty looked Ronstadt up and asked her to elaborate.
She got comments like this:
“I still like Tucson; I still like to come back and I love to see my friends. I love to go to Mexico, which is more like Tucson was when I liked it than Tucson is anymore. ... I’m sad about the downtown. I’m glad that people are down there, but the buildings look like Stalinist Russia. They’re so generic. They didn’t seem to realize that Tucson in the old days had a distinctive architecture.”
You know, most of the new architecture in downtown isn’t brilliant, and I wish it were better, but “Stalinist” may be overstating it just a bit. And the symbolic significance of those buildings — the rebirth of downtown as a place to invest money — seems to have escaped her. Of course, a person who can afford to spend her days surrounded by the brilliance and riches of San Francisco might have a little trouble relating to the challenges of more humble places.
Asked for the umpteenth time why she left Tucson to make San Francisco her permanent home, Ronstadt said:
“One thing, it was a car culture. To take (my son) to school, it would take about 25 to 30 minutes. ... It was like living in Los Angeles. And where we moved in San Francisco, my son could walk or ride a skateboard to school; it was just three blocks. It gave him a chance to develop a concept of neighborhood culture that was made on a human scale for foot traffic.”
I can see her main point here, but “it was like living in Los Angeles” — really? Also, living in Colonia Solana, right in the middle of Tucson, Ronstadt could have chosen plenty of fine schools closer than a half-hour drive.
Ronstadt also told Finnerty she was upset with the fact that in Tucson her kids brought home anti-gay talk from school and had friends who believed people would go to hell if they weren’t Christians.
“It kept happening, so eventually I decided that (they needed to move). Safety is small groups of like-minded people, and the group was so small in Tucson. It was certainly there; I have wonderful friends there and I’m really glad that I went back because I got to pick up those friendships in a certain way that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t lived there for 10 years. But I just didn’t want my children to be influenced by that kind of thinking.”
This is a revealing comment. Ronstadt seems to mean here that she wants to live among like-minded people, but that in Tucson the group was too small. Sure, it’s nice to have like-minded people around, but it’s also crucial for a person’s growth to have to grapple with different perspectives. It makes you wonder if she fled from them instead.
All Ronstadt’s comments would be more notable and useful if she hadn’t been making similar critiques repeatedly. The Star has been among those who quoted her over at least eight years about the many reasons she left Tucson. In 2007, she told my colleague Cathalena Burch that a top reason for her departure was the bad air caused by dust stirred up by rapacious developers blading the desert.
Ronstadt also rails against the “greedy and cynical development” of the Catalina Foothills in her 2013 memoir, “Simple Dreams,” in the short section describing her wonderful upbringing. And in last year’s romanticized writings in The New York Times about traveling with Ronstadt down the Rio Sonora Valley, she said, “It feels so much like home, more like Tucson than Tucson.”
To Ronstadt, I say, enough already. We understand you don’t like how Tucson has changed from the way it was in your youth, a half-century ago in the 1950s and 1960s. But you don’t live here anymore. And you’re not saying anything that we haven’t heard already or couldn’t figure out ourselves.
To the writers who keep asking her about leaving Arizona, I say, Why? What more does she have to offer on the subject? Ask her about her music and induction this year into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Or ask her about San Francisco, where she actually lives.
