Ernesto Portillo Jr.'s best of 2014

The phone on my desk rang last week and the halting voice said, “Hi, Mr. Portillo, this is Natalia Moncayo. Do you remember me?”

OMG yes, I told her. And I choked up.

In 2005 I wrote two stories about Natalia, who was then 9 years old. An inoperable brain tumor left her unable to walk. Speaking and seeing were difficult. She couldn’t attend Drexel Elementary School and she spent much of her time lying on the floor of her parents’ south-side apartment.

Complicating her medical condition, Natalia couldn’t receive necessary medical care because she and her parents were undocumented immigrants. They had fled the violence in their native Colombia five years earlier. They found refuge in Tucson, where Natalie’s sister Rebeca was born. The family struggled against the odds.

I wrote a second story that some big-hearted Tucsonans donated a bed, a wheelchair and provided other support to Natalia and her family. It was a small glimmer in their darkness.

I had wondered, over the years, what had become of Natalia and her family. Life is brutally hard for families who cannot legally work and provide for themselves adequately, much less the Moncayos, who were desperately seeking and praying for an answer to Natalia’s brain tumor.

Then she called. Her voice filled me with joyful emotion. She wanted to interview me for her college class assignment.

Wednesday night I visited with the Moncayos in their roomy home on Tucson’s southeast side near the University of Arizona Tech Park. A smiling Natalia, now 19, greeted me at the door. Rebeca, 12 years old, is in the eighth grade at Vail Academy and High School. Her mother, Daisy, and father, Jhon, were there, as was Camila Hurtado, Natalia’s 17-year-old cousin from Colombia who is studying in Tucson.

They have so many reasons to be thankful. No need to ask. They immediately acknowledged their blessings.

“A lot of good things have come from this,” said Natalia about her family’s trials these past years.

Natalia and her parents are U.S. citizens. Her father has a job, with benefits, with Pima County. They bought their home after hard work and saving.

Above all, Natalia, or Natty as her family calls her, has beaten the doctors’ dire predictions. She shouldn’t be alive.

“It’s not supposed to be possible but it is,” said Natalia, who graduated from Sunnyside High School and is now in her second semester at Pima Community College. She hopes to transfer to the University of Arizona and eventually study law.

“It’s a miracle of God,” Jhon Moncayo said in Spanish.

The appreciation extends to Rebeca, who clearly understands that life can not be taken for granted and that she and her family are indeed fortunate.

“It’s helped me to be more patient and considerate,” she said about her family’s travails. In her sister, Rebeca finds inspiration.

“She’s made a big impact on my life,” said Rebeca, who one day wants to be a doctor.

Natalia still has the tumor which continues to affect her speech and mobility. Natalia wishes her life would be different. She has a few friends and making new ones is difficult.

But in the past eight years she has not had to see a doctor.

“The Bible says if you love him, your life will be OK,” Natalia said. “I’ve applied that to my life.”

The Moncayos’ hope and optimism comes from their religious faith, supported by their small congregation, Nueva Creación, in South Tucson. It sustains them. Every step of their way, through Natalia’s uncertain future, they put their lives in God.

Like the time when Jhon had to return to Colombia, as a condition of his application for residency because he had entered this country without documents. The family was in despair, not knowing if he could return and if so, when?

Daisy said they prayed and prayed.

But his residency request was expedited because of Natalia’s medical condition. He spent six months away instead of the many years his family had feared.

The irony is not lost on the family. While her medical condition brought them pain and worry, it helped them become U.S. citizens.

“Every day is a blessing,” said Natalia.

Four years ago, the Southwestern Mission Research Center ceased taking busloads of inquisitive folks to tour northern Sonora, along the routes blazed by Jesuit explorer Eusebio Francisco Kino. The trips, which had been occurring for more than three decades, came to a halt over fears of insecurity in the small towns.

But the center has resurrected its tours, starting with one late next month.

It’s a good sign, not just for the center and its volunteers of Pimería Alta fans, but for many on both sides of the line who long for a time when cross-border trips were common, part of daily life, and not given to second-guessing.

Resumption of the mission tours reflects the reality that traveling in Sonora is not the dangerous activity it was once.

“This is the interface with Mexico,” said Michael Brescia, president of the nonprofit SMRC and associate director of the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona.

Brescia said the upcoming tour will allow visitors to “get beyond the headlines.” The headlines, however, had truth to them.

When SMRC cancelled its trips in 2010, the residents of northern Sonora struggled with the chokehold that competing cartels had placed on their towns. Cartel gunmen, armed with weapons smuggled from the U.S., shot it out between themselves or with Mexican law enforcment and military in the Sáric-Tubutama area, about 40 miles south of the border.

There were a number of sensational shootings that shattered the peacefulness of the Altar River Valley.

Tourists stayed away, as did Southern Arizonans with long ties to their ancestral families’ towns of Caborca, Oquitoa, Pitiquitio, San Ignacio and Magdalena de Kino, where the missionary explorer’s remains are interred in the town plaza.

These family connections long preceded the creation of the border in the mid-1800s.

Kino established missions in the Pimería Alta, the region generally composed of northern Sonora and Southern Arizona, in the late 1600s.

The center’s tours — in its heyday there were six a year — took more than 6,000 people to see these communities firsthand, and to meet people like Doña Chata, the elderly caretaker of the church on the plaza in San Ignacio who hosted a Sunday lunch in her small backyard overlooking planted fields irrigated by the acequia, and Gloria Elena Santini, who spearheaded the restoration of the 200-year-old La Purísima Concepción del Caborca in Caborca, which shares similar design and construction with Mission San Xavier del Bac south of Tucson.

Brescia said these connections to the past are personal today.

Before the decision was made to re-establish the mission visits, a trial-balloon weekend trip was made in the spring, said David Yubeta, a longtime volunteer who traveled with docents from Mission San Xavier.

The towns were peaceful and there were no hints of danger, said Yubeta, a retired preservationist for the National Park Service at Tumacácori. In Tubutama, the police were present, which reassured him.

But what was more telling was that the residents were joyful that a tourist-filled bus — the first one in several years — rolled into their towns. People welcomed the Kino followers.

“They asked if the tours were returning,” Yubeta said.

Dale Brenneman, a Mission Center board member, sure hopes so.

He said Sonoran friends and contacts report that daily life is calm on the Kino trail. “I don’t see a particular threat to Americans coming down,” said Brenneman, curator of documentary history at the State Museum.

What the center and the townspeople hope is that the next bus of visitors will return to Tucson and tell their friends and families that it’s all right to travel in Sonora. “They’ll be our ambassadors,” Brenneman said.

The tour is scheduled for Oct. 31 to Nov. 2, the Day of the Dead weekend. The tour has 22 people signed up. A second tour is planned for spring 2015.

Take a trip. Learn some history and culture. Get a deeper understanding of our shared region. Contact Brenneman at tours@southwestmissions.org or at 621-6278.

The other evening my wife announced: “I smell rain.”

I didn’t because my sense of smell sucks but Linda, like many other Tucsonans, picked up that unique seasonal scent. No sooner than hearing her pronouncement, I went to the source of all authority: social media. Sure enough there were a sprinkling of similar comments by my Facebook friends.

“I smell rain,” wrote Jeff Rogers.

“Pipe down ... I think I hear something,” Ted Prezelski posted.

And Karla Gómez Escamilla, a reporter for Telemundo, the Spanish-language television network, posted a photo of her rain-splashed windshield while in Nogales. That was mean.

By Thursday parts of the Tucson area got a good drenching — fitting, since rain almost always threatens the Fourth of July holiday.

It’s that time of year when Tucsonans are teased by the smell of impending summer rains, the appearance of bubbling storm clouds and the anticipation of the chorus of thunderclaps. We begin to count the days (not unlike our countdown to our first 100-degree day or at a lesser level the wait for the Night Blooming Cereus at Tohono Chul Park) before the first downpour arrives.

By the end of June, rain-starved Tucsonenses can’t wait for water.

One day last week I saw two co-workers rush out of the newsroom to the balcony overlooking the inner patio at the Arizona Daily Star. I asked Samantha Munsey and Johanna Eubank, what was going on.

They said they had heard celestial rumblings and wanted to see if rain was in the making. I looked up to see a cloudless, hot blue sky. We returned inside disappointed.

While many of us eagerly wait for the monsoons to roll in, it’s not a universal pastime in Tucson. I suspect most people under the age of 40 don’t care or don’t understand this primal feeling.

Oh sure, there are some enlightened, appreciative Tucsonans who were born after 1974 who get antsy, but waiting for the rain is a characteristic of older folks. But I’m just guessing here.

Certainly growing up in Tucson, I don’t recall waiting for the rains to rake my west-side neighborhood like I do now. All I remember are the summer days when we got soaked and the wet desert behind St. Mary’s Hospital was our playground.

When the fat gray clouds opened up, out we went to dance in the puddles that collected on North San Rafael Avenue and feel the drops of water explode on our heads.

We were especially fond of the arroyo that ran behind our house. During the dry periods, which was nearly year-round, the wash held our secret hiding spots. But we were wise enough to stay out of the wash when it became a torrential mini river filled with swirling muddy water.

Playing in the rain would all come to a sudden and obligatory stop when lightning lit up the afternoon skies. Back inside to wait for the next lightning-free chubasco.

These are the summer days that mark Tucson, the ones that we can’t get enough of, filled with deep, dark rain clouds and creosote-scented humid air. As I finish writing, the sky is dark. The monsoons have arrived for their annual show, thankfully. We’ll chatter about the latest cloudburst, and we’ll post outbursts of hoopla and photos of water-streaked car windows on Facebook and Twitter.

And in what will seem like a blur, after days and nights of blistering lightning, thundering reverberations and pounding rain, this will all have passed, leaving us waiting for the next year.

When Joel Medina contemplated leaving Honduras for “el Norte” a year ago, he understood the risks. But no one tried to talk him out of it.

Thousands and thousands of Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans have done the same: attempt the dangerous trip north through Mexico into the U.S. and, if they are extremely fortunate, find a better life than the one they left. Others are fleeing into neighboring Belize and Panama.

So Medina, who was then 17 years old, along with an older brother, ventured into the unknown.

I talked with Medina on Thursday at the Pico de Gallo restaurant on South Sixth Avenue in South Tucson, not far from where Medina lives in a small apartment. Dressed in plaid bermuda shorts, a cap and a sleeveless T-shirt sporting the political message “We Stand With Monica Jones,” he recounted his experience, explained his reasons for leaving home and family, and unfolded his dreams.

Central American youths have poured into the U.S. in the past year only to end up in detention centers which are sprouting in border communities including Nogales and Tucson. The federal government is scrambling to care for the youths, many of them unaccompanied. They have fled terror and poverty to chase dreams.

Medina, who has a ninth-grade education, was one of these youths. Living in rural Honduras, jobs were scarce. Violence, related to drug wars, was abundant. An older brother was killed, Medina said.

“I do not know why. I do not have an answer,” he said about his brother. Medina answered the question about his life and future by leaving his parents and sister.

He and another brother traveled on buses from Honduras to Chiapas, Mexico, which borders Guatemala. In Mexico, they hopped on freight trains traveling north. Unlike the majority of Central Americans who head toward the Texas border on the infamous train “La Bestia,” the Medina brothers took a longer route along Mexico’s Pacific coast with Nogales, Sonora, as their destination.

The monthlong trip was fraught with danger, threats and little food, he said.

Atop the freight cars rode hundreds of people, including children and women, Medina said. Some fell off the trains, others were pushed off in fights or were struck by rocks thrown at them by youths. But they also found compassion in Mexican towns where residents gave the migrants food and water, Medina added.

When the brothers arrived in Nogales, Sonora, they were accosted by local police who harangued them but nothing more, Medina said. Turning toward the border, they crossed and were promptly apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents.

Before Medina left, he understood the possibility, at best, of being apprehended, or at worse, being injured or killed in his long journey. In Central America stories abound of those who lost limbs while riding the trains or who were assaulted by gangs. And there are countless families who have lost a family member.

“People know it,” he said of the dangers. “You do not have to say it.”

Medina was lucky during the trip and after he was detained. While his brother was deported, Medina was sent to a Phoenix detention center for unaccompanied youths. A month later he was sent to North Carolina where an aunt, a legal resident, resided.

U.S. law allows migrant children to join family members already in this country. But the youths are not given legal status. They are required to report to federal court and are subject to deportation. They are not given a free pass, a message the United States has been sending to Central America.

In February, Medina, now 18, came to Tucson. His brother also managed to illegally re-enter the country. Medina works as a landscaper, when there is work. The irony is not lost on him: He left Honduras, in part, because of the lack of jobs, only to find a lack of employment in Tucson.

However, here he feels safe. More importantly, he believes he has a future, although it is not secure because of his uncertain legal status.

But Medina will take uncertainty of a productive future over the certainty of relentless poverty and violence.

“I had no choice,” he said.

When Jessica Garcia and Dario Andrade graduate this week from Pima Community College, they’ll do so with dreams of continuing their studies at the University of Arizona.

But it’s unlikely, at this point, that both graduates of local high schools will be able to attend the UA. They would have to pay out-of-state tuition, which at nearly $30,000 a year, is impossible for them.

Garcia and Andrade are Dreamers, young Americans who were brought to this country as children and lack legal residency. While the two have received Deferred Action, which allows them to work without risk of being deported, it is temporary. But Deferred Action, granted two years ago by President Obama, does not apply to their family members.

“Our families are in fear of being deported,” said Garcia, a business major who graduated from Sunnyside High School in 2009.

I met with the two, along with Eduardo Sainz, also a Dreamer and a PCC student, at the UA Friday. Scores of smiling UA students in their graduation gowns and caps, and their proud families, milled around campus. The image was not lost on the trio.

But in a few years, the three might wear a UA graduation gown if — and it’s a big if — Congress comes to a smart agreement on comprehensive immigration reform or, lacking sensible bipartisan action, President Obama expands the Deferred Action program to include family members of the 610,000 individuals who have temporary deferred status.

There are clear signs that the Obama administration is considering executive action on immigration. Homeland Security is expected to ease up on deportations of individuals, specifically those who have no criminal record and whose family members are U.S. citizens.

In a White House speech to law-enforcement officials from across the country, Obama urged them to support immigration reform. He said it is the right road to take but that Republicans are blocking immigration reform.

The Dreamers don’t buy the president’s finger-pointing. They say the lack of comprehensive immigration falls on both political parties.

“We hold both sides accountable. At the end of the day, it comes down to politics,” said Sainz, a 2011 graduate of Flowing Wells High School who is working with Mi Familia Vota, a voter outreach program. “They’re not thinking what’s best for our families and our communities. They’re thinking what’s best for their parties.”

The three want the government to end deportations that separate families. They want a permanent solution to allow their parents, siblings and themselves to live in peace in a country they call home.

Andrade knows all too well the horror of deportation.

In December his mother was stopped by police. The car she was driving was emitting too much smoke. Police called the Border Patrol, and she was taken to the Eloy Detention Center, where she spent four days.

The family rallied to get her released on a $4,000 bond, but she still faces deportation to Mexico, which she left more than 10 years ago with her husband and three children.

That’s the reality of Dreamers — highly motivated young people who live fearful lives full of obstacles. Here in Arizona, they can’t even get drivers’ licenses.

They also fear that Congress will not pass immigration reform and that Obama, fearful of Republican backlash, will not expand Deferred Action or ease deportation of families.

However, they refuse to stop championing their just cause.

Garcia, who works with Scholarships A-Z — which supports Dreamers in their pursuit of college — said the group will continue to engage others and broaden public support.

Sainz said he and other Dreamers will continue to register more Latino voters. Andrade promised that more pressure will be placed on local and state political leaders.

“You have to fight for what you want,” Sainz said. “There’s nothing worse than doing nothing.”

I wonder who was Esther G. Castro. Also what was Oscar Elias like?

Two unknown people but certainly not to someone or their families who made small but visible efforts to remember them in special ways: Castro and Elias are commemorated in two small shrines along the new walking paths in Sentinel Peak Park.

A small brown wood cross bears the name of Elias and the years he lived, 1933-2012. A few yards away, Castro’s name and 1940-2001 are printed on a yellow heart planted in a bouquet of white, pink and yellow plastic flowers at the foot of a saguaro which looks like a sentinel. Attached to the display is a yellow fuzzy Easter basket.

The memorials are visible cultural landmarks of our Southern Arizona landscape. The organic monuments come in all shapes, colors and sizes. There are the “ghost bikes” or wreaths and crosses on the roadside to mark a spot where someone died. Some shrines also mark the completion of a manda, a promise made by the living to the dead.

The “A” Mountain shrines and all others are part of our “ritual genes,” said Maribel Alvarez, anthropologist, folklorist and associate professor with the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona.

Since ancient times people have marked public spaces, left traces and told stories of our humanity, said Alvarez, who also doubles as the annual Tucson Meet Yourself festival program director.

From cave drawings to petroglyphs to roadside shrines, there is a universal thread. “It’s innate ... It’s very common to the human nature,” she said.

It didn’t take long for the unobtrusive shrines to appear on the new addition to “A” Mountain. The paths, two ramadas and interpretive signs about the history of Sentinel Peak were installed as part of last summer’s $320,000 park improvements on the hill’s southern face.

In addition to the shrines to Castro and Elias, there is a third one but it is dedicated to no one specifically. It is a green metal barrel, which looks like the trash containers found in the city’s parks. The shrine-in-a-barrel is embedded partially into the ground and covered by the black volcanic rocks. Plastic flowers and a black rosary adorn the shrine. A partially burned candle with the image of Christ is nestled in a rocky nook.

I wondered if “A” Mountain, which is considered the birthplace of Tucson, had been a special place for Elias and Castro. Maybe their homes can be seen from that side of the Tucson landmark, which the city acquired in 1928 .

Alvarez said the practice of erecting shrines is a practical function for people who create them, especially for those who grieve. It is a way to express outwardly the internal sorrow over loss. It also is a public expression of the joy of the life the deceased person lived, added Alvarez.

“It’s unique here. We do it with flair, with gusto, with ganas,” she said.

While the shrines are steeped in our regional culture and history, some also reflect a religious aspect, which sometimes creates friction.

Last June a Wisconsin organization asked the city to remove a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe which sits in a nicho on the southeast slope of “A” Mountain.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation argued that allowing the two-decade-old shrine, erected by a Tucsonan, to remain on city property constituted city endorsement of religion.

The presence of the religious shrine would open the door to other religious symbols on public property, the Foundation asserted.

The city responded that the Guadalupe shrine would not be removed because it did not pose a threat to public safety or health.

City Councilwoman Regina Romero, whose Ward 1 includes “A” Mountain, said the city has respect for these symbols of our culture and history. The shrines go beyond reflecting religious beliefs. They are reflections of us.

The shrines are a marriage of traditions handed down through our history and traditions from all corners of the globe.

“It’s a part of where we live,” Romero said.

After years of drugs, running with a gang, seeing his life spiral away, Cesar Aguirre had a decision to make. Either continue or change.

Aguirre chose change.

Today the 31-year-old continues to make changes — for himself, his two young daughters and for others living on the edge. He is a community activist, organizing parents at his daughter’s school and other schools. He works with Sun Tran bus riders who are lobbying against fare increases, and he prepares food for the homeless and hungry at the Casa Maria Soup Kitchen.

Casa Maria is also home for him and his girls, who are 10 and 7 years old.

“I’m happy here,” said Aguirre. “We have everything we need.”

As a full-time community organizer, Aguirre receives $10 a week and gas money. He and his daughters live in a small apartment at Casa Maria, at South Third Avenue and East 26th Street. They eat the food prepared in the soup kitchen and wear clothes found in the donation bin.

For Aguirre and his girls, life is good. He said he has learned the “difference between a want and a need.”

I caught up with Aguirre last week, at a meeting of the Tucson Bus Riders Union at the Armory Park Senior Center and the next day at his apartment, where his mom, Maria Aguirre, was helping with the family laundry.

Hey, even a busy community activist needs help.

Aguirre said he chose this life of service and activism after he enrolled his eldest daughter at Ochoa Elementary in South Tucson. One of Tucson Unified School District’s older schools, Ochoa serves primarily Latino and indigenous students. Rates of poverty, social stress factors, single parents, unemployment and low wages are off the charts as families struggle to survive.

Aguirre knew first-hand the obstacles that street life places on Ochoa’s families. He survived his own.

In his youth, his family moved several times, finally ending up in Three Points, southwest of Tucson. He went to Flowing Wells High School, then to Sunnyside High School. But he dropped out.

The lure of gangs and drugs and alcohol was stronger. He lived with his two younger siblings and their parents but his mom and dad were absent often because they worked long hours.

“We lost our family base and connection,” said Aguirre. As a young teen, he felt disconnected. He found a family in a south-side gang. He began using and then dealing drugs. Selling coke gave him cash and credibility.

“I felt like I belonged,” said.

His mother, who has heard these words before, still cringed at feeling the pain again.

“I’m so sorry mijo,” she said to him. “I did not know.”

Aguirre’s self-evaluation and road to change began to take shape in early 2001. His cousin was shot and killed outside a downtown nightclub. Aguirre was supposed to have been with him that night.

“It could have been me,” he said.

Getting out and drying out was hard, however. He still surrounded himself with friends, including a girlfriend, who continued to abuse themselves with drugs and booze. In 2005 he was charged with domestic violence and disorderly conduct, both felonies.

He spent some in prison and a year later his second daughter was born. The baby had cocaine in her system.

Aguirre continued to push his way out. Released from prison, he worked and took full custody of his daughters. He enrolled at Pima Community College.

But it was at Ochoa that his outlook and determination changed. TUSD considered closing Ochoa in 2012, prompting a strong response from parents and South Tucson.

Aguirre joined in. He felt a connection. Ochoa’s families became his.

He attended school board meetings and public rallies. Seeing the disparate resources available to low-income families, sharing their struggles to sustain themselves, “I realized I could do something to change their lives,” he said.

Rallying the poor and the underserved is now his mission. His daughters often accompany him to meetings and protests. He wants his girls to see life the way many people in Tucson experience it.

His mother beamed with pride.

“I don’t think I’ve seen my son so happy. He feels good giving back,” she said.

Meet Alejandra Salazar.

She’s a daughter and a sister. She’s a graduate of Amphi High School and a student at Pima Community College, with hopes of transferring to the University of Arizona. She works in retail.

Salazar also happens to be an undocumented immigrant. While her legal status is not what defines her as a person, it’s her legal status that prevents her from being a full participant in our community.

But someday she will be a U.S. citizen because history, demographics and the political winds are on her side.

The 22-year-old Salazar, who has a temporary reprieve from deportation under the Deferred Action initiative, which also permits her to work, is not deterred from seeking fairness for herself and thousands of other Dreamers, including her younger brother.

“DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is temporary relief but is not the answer,” said Salazar, while we talked in the PCC West Campus cafeteria last week.

I first met her last month when I heard her talk at a forum on immigration and education at the YWCA on North Bonita Avenue. Salazar impressed me with her articulateness and thoughtfulness. She’s like most of the Dreamers I’ve met, individuals whom we need more of.

Her parents brought her and Manuel, her 19-year-old brother, to Tucson 10 years ago, from Guaymas, Sonora. Salazar and Manuel are two of the more than 430,000 individuals who received Deferred Action within the first year after President Obama approved the program in August 2012, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

While Salazar and her brother are safe from being deported to a country that is not their home, their parents are not. Her parents, like the millions of other undocumented immigrants, live stealth lives. Moreover, DACA is a presidential directive that can be reversed by a new president.

Dreamers have become some of the most active groups in the fight for immigration reform. They are energetic and they have a persuasive moral argument on their side. Salazar works with Scholarships A-Z, which provides information and resources to undocumented students.

Politically, Salazar sees the growing number of Latino voters as a critical potential factor in determining future elections. A growing number of these voters have family members who have been hurt by our dysfunctional immigration policy.

Although the DACA program is the first of its kind in our immigration history, it’s not the first time the United States has opened its doors to undocumented immigrants, said immigration attorney Margo Cowan.

Cowan, who has defended immigrants since the 1970s and who spoke at the YWCA forum, said the first legalization came in the late 1920s. A second occurred in the 1940s during World War II. “We wanted to say ‘thank you’” to the undocumented immigrants who helped sustain the U.S. economy during the war, Cowan said.

But in 1986, the “welcoming” policy turned when the Reagan administration implemented the amnesty program.

Cowan said it was the first radical policy departure from welcoming immigrants, as amnesty implied “we must pardon you for your transgressions, for coming to clean the toilet and pick the fruit.”

According to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, more than 3.7 million undocumented immigrants have been legalized in the United States since 1986. Between 1929 and 1986, more than 1.5 million individuals’ legal status was fixed by Congress.

Some form of legalization is coming, as political and economic pressures mount. The Republicans in the U.S. House insist there will be no immigration reform this year but history says it is inevitable.

“It’s the next generational step that goes back decades,” Cowan said.

Salazar will wait. She’s confident but she knows she and millions of others like her and who support immigration reform have a lot of work to counter the efforts of the “last gaspers,” those opposed to any kind of reform and, as Cowan said, who are “doing everything they can to make it as miserable and create as much suffering as they can.”

This is a transitory moment for Salazar. For us as well.

In the Rincon Heights neighborhood, at the southeast corner of East 10th Street and North Mountain Avenue, sits an old, lovely home. While it is empty and in need of lots of TLC, the house still radiates yesterday’s charm and character.

The house was built in 1897, six years after the University of Arizona held its first class, and once was the residence of Clara Lee Tanner, a pioneering UA archaeologist and Native American art curator.

It’s the kind of residence that enabled the Rincon Heights neighborhood to gain, last February, designation on the National Register of Historic Places.

The neighborhood designation, however, does not protect the adobe ranch home at 1300 E. 10th St. from being razed. Unless it is bought, for the asking price of $400,000, the property owner is expected to build a large, two-story apartment complex for UA students.

To the neighbors, the planned project will scar Rincon Heights and burden it, but to the property owner, it’s a business decision.

“I understand we need to densify, but we need to do it the right way. That’s a challenge,” said Colby Henley, president of the Rincon Heights Neighborhood Association.

Henley, his neighbors and Ward 6 Councilman Steve Kozachik have had discussions with the property owner, Jarrett Reidhead of Tucson Integrity Realty, about preserving the property but to no avail.

Reidhead, a 35-year-old Marana resident, said he plans to tear down the two-bedroom, three-bath, 1,760-square-foot home and adjoining guest house. He then plans to erect four eight-bedroom residences, two stories high, with a pool in the middle, which will house at least 32 people and — if he wants to, because law allows him — up to 64.

“There is a university there and demand for housing,” said Reidhead, a 2003 UA grad who played on the Mountain View High School varsity basketball team.

And developing housing is his business, added Reidhead, who has a total of seven properties in Rincon Heights. Of the seven, three were remodeled and one was torn down, and of the other three, two will be demolished and the remaining one will be remodeled.

He said residents should pool their resources and buy and preserve coveted properties.

These two forces, neighborhood preservation and development, have long clashed in Tucson, especially around the university area, as well as in some of Tucson’s older downtown barrios.

While the city of Tucson has provided some protection for the pressured neighborhoods, and tax laws give owners of old homes some incentive to preserve their properties, these measures are not enough to retain historic structures and prevent multi-unit complexes from taking their place.

If the property owner meets the regulations and zoning requirements, the owner can bulldoze and build big. The result is the slow erosion of homes and structures, erasing the richness of Tucson’s history and character.

“We become a place that people are no longer interested in visiting because it looks like every other place,” said Gretchen Lueck, a resident in Rincon Heights who has also met with Reidhead.

In the petition for the national designation, the Tucson Historic Preservation Office wrote that Rincon Heights provided homes for families associated with the UA and the railroad.

“Interestingly, the lack of deed restrictions within Rincon Heights created a neighborhood with a high degree of racial, religious and ethnic diversity. Today, the neighborhood exhibits an eclectic mix of architectural styles ranging from American Territorial to mid-century Ranch homes.”

Jonathan Mabry, the city’s preservation officer, said the designation on the National Registry does not put any new regulations on the use of private property. In Tucson there are 34 neighborhoods designated on the registry. Rincon Heights is the most recent.

For six neighborhoods, the city has an “overlay,” which sets stricter regulations to make any significant changes to exteriors of historical structures, said Mabry. Rincon Heights doesn’t have the overlay.

It simply has a great location, just south of the UA and east of downtown, and it has what many people look for in its graceful character. It’s why Reidhead and other developers are looking to build apartments in Rincon Heights and other older areas.

The irony, of course, is that the development of large, out-of-character buildings will destroy the very charm that makes Rincon Heights special.