Tucson Salvage: Two countries, one city

It is one of those desolate but inviting fireworks tents that pop up around this city in the days leading up to the Fourth of July. Red circus stripes on white canvas propped up on poles. This one sits on a lot with a distant ranch house, surrounded by a little mesquite forest, just south of the dry Rillito River on Craycroft Road. It is the night before the Fourth.

The tent houses all manner of fireworks, displayed on portable tables erected on dirt. Folks arrive in the couple hours I am here, moms and dads, kids, lovers, one guy with a holstered weapon and regrettable face tattoo. Most spend large amounts of cash on the noisy paraphernalia in, I suppose, honor of the Declaration of Independence.

“Scan the barcode with your phone and see the fireworks in action,” said 18-year-old Clifford Moton, star soccer player and recent Catalina Foothills High grad. He’s sitting behind a point-of-sale computer, talking to a dad with two young sons in tow.

Moton is lanky, cropped hair bleached on top. “I’m ready for the hair to be gone,” he said. “Me and my four friends cut off and bleached our hair together.”

Sitting beside him eating Taco Bell are his close cousin Uriah Verril and their friend Grace Shoemaker.

“Some say I sing like Lil Baby.” They all laugh.

Moton works for Buckelew Fireworks seasonally, a part-time gig he’s had for two years. He works weekly at a Tucson barber supply store. Moton plans to attend Pima Community College to study finance. He is close to his parents who, he tells me, met in high school — dad a high school football star and mom a cheerleader. Sometimes one parent or the other comes and keeps him company while he works the tent. It gets damn hot here during the day.

I see “Let’s Go, Brandon” fireworks featuring President Joe Biden’s face on the package. I bring this up to the kids, who shrug-laugh. “Yeah,” Moton said, “I don’t order ’em. I just got ’em to sell.”

They talk of the Fourth of July, getting together with family, eating, celebrating. American kids on an American night.

***

It is the Fourth of July, midday, the sun burns mercilessly from a cloudless sky and the hot wind does little but thicken the parched desert air. At least the cicadas sing, their natural predators disabled by the heat.

There isn’t a single customer around, and Carolyn sits alone in the 104-degree shade. The little air conditioner perched behind her is shut off. She prefers it outdoors. She grins and brings me a bottle of cold water from an ice chest. A beautiful accordion-and-waltz walia tune — a kind of Sonoran dance music — plays on her radio, tuned to Tohono O’odham community station KHON. Her face is heart-shaped and welcoming, eyes sky blue, skin a robust brown.

Carolyn is not selling fireworks. She’s selling jewelry created by her ex-husband, the esteemed Joe Begay, an 83-year-old gentleman whose business card reads, “Navajo Silversmith, Actor, Singer.”

Now this isn’t really a store, more of a portico of red-painted wood, set into a corner of the San Xavier Plaza marketplace where the few indoor shops and eatery are shuttered for the holiday. It is located across a parking lot, south from the stunning Mission San Xavier del Bac, on Tohono O’odham Nation land.

Begay’s pieces sit inside glass encasement, beautiful inlaid heartlines on pendants and cuff bracelets, silver feathers on earrings, silver-and-leather bolos with “man in a maze” designs, and heishi turquoise and silver necklaces. Others represent animals, desert landscapes and mountains. Lovely, earned creations, pregnant with connotation.

The 65-year-old Carolyn looks younger than her years (“I feel like I’m 24”). She is reticent but shares fragments of her life as an O’odham, expressing the ups and downs with hand gestures, saying, “I have been up here, and I have been down here. Friends tell me I should write a book.”

She is a very private person, dislikes seeing photos of herself (“if you look at my Facebook page, you won’t find a single picture of me”), asks me not to use a photo or her last name for this story. She smiles, said, “I don’t like a lot of people knowing me.”

At any rate, Begay is not here today at his store, and Carolyn said she’s here instead a couple times a week. “It seems I cover him more and more,” she laughs.

Conversation drifts around. We talk Christopher Columbus, human trafficker, rapist and murderer, and how there is, finally, an Indigenous Day. How O’odham shed Papago, the derogatory name bestowed upon them by colonizers (“We are ‘the desert people’”).

A roadrunner appears beneath a tall decorated saguaro skeleton, peeks at the two of us, hangs a moment waiting for a scrap of food that doesn’t arrive and vanishes.

Carolyn adds Begay has beaten cancer three times and explains how he learned Diné silversmithing as a boy.

She then produces a thick, weathered scrapbook, crammed with yellowing photos of Joe in film costume. Images of him alongside screen stars of yore, Kris Kristofferson, Michael Landon, Ann Margaret, Kevin Costner and sundry others from sets in Arizona, many taken at the Old Tucson studios. Joe’s been in many films, playing a Mexican or a Native, Carolyn said. He played Geronimo in “The Buffalo Soldiers,” he sings in 1979’s “The Frisco Kid,” appeared in “Tin Cup.” TV too, “Little House on the Prairie.” The list goes on.

She talks of her mother, a diminutive woman who birthed 13 children. Three of those remain. The others? She shakes her head, “sicknesses, drugs. Those were different times.

“My mom lost a lot of babies, three total.” A set of twins died of pneumonia. There was no medical in San Miquel, Arizona, a tiny village near the Mexican border in the Tohono O’odham Nation where the family lived. You had to take a bus out. “That’s why we had to move to the main reservation.”

She tells a story from in her teens: A brother had drowned in a party area near Kitt Peak, got his pant leg stuck underwater and never came back up. Sun went down, the police arrived with searchlights and pulled him out.

The daughter of a road-maintenance man, she was born in the middle of her 12 siblings, near where we are. Her English is clear, breezy even; her endangered native tongue is O’odham, an Uto-Aztecan language dating back thousands of years and spoken by 10,000 to 14,000 people, mostly in Southern Arizona and parts of Sonora, Mexico. It is tenseless, and therefore downplays significance to time.

She is the only sibling who did not get shipped off the reservation to a boarding school; instead, she lived with an aunt and attended high school in Casa Grande, after which she attended Pima Community College, Chaparral College and got hired white-collar at IBM in Tucson, the only Tohono in her department, she recalls, and she “became a workaholic” for ten years.

She met Begay at 18, and her parents loved him. They married and had three daughters, half-Navajo, half O’odham. Her one son is adopted. She stops to count her grandchildren, 19 total, one daughter mothers nine of those, and one great-grandchild.

After IBM, she kicked off her heels and followed her spirit of adventure. She got into drink and trouble, smuggling from Mexico, which she doesn’t want to talk about. But she said, “It was so easy before 9/11, everyone was doing it.” She pauses, “I would never do that now. We could cross freely until 9/11. We had people whose children had died, we would hand a casket over the fence so the dead baby could be buried on the homeland, sneaking it across to the other side.”

She continues, “I grew up helping immigrants. They weren’t called immigrants then — just people. Now you get in trouble just putting water out there.”

There is a pride lurking behind her laughs and eye rolls, an “is-what-it-is” resignation, during the couple hours I hang with Carolyn. There is suspicion too, and she considers things she figures beyond my comprehension or maybe she’s too exhausted or jaded to lay them out to whites like me. How Tohono O’odham traditions and sacred beliefs involve water, earth and it all working together, and of life itself; the plants and animals of the Sonoran Desert play roles in their cultural narratives and teachings passed down by their elders and ancestors. She speaks of O’odham New Year celebrated this time of year with the harvesting of baidaj (saguaro fruit) and holds life force in their traditions, rain and dance ceremonies. “When you are offered the wine from the fruit, you are supposed to drink it, cleanses you for the new year.” She pauses, “It tastes awful.”

She is an American Native in 2023. The Tohono people I have known seemed to embody a fierce sense of dignity and honor in preserving their personal narrative histories, the centuries of antecedents. Is it any wonder? The nation suffered through coercive assimilationist policies. It makes me keenly aware of my own shallow whiteness.

A couple, mid-40s, dressed in lots of red, white and blue, scans the glass-encased silver and turquoise work, in awe over it. They’re from Reno, Nevada, they say, as a point of some kind of odd pride. They purchase from her a little carved coyote for $6, and move off to cross the empty parking lot to the Mission San Xavier del Bac.

The stunning 227-year-old mission always feels both majestic and haunted to me. Its eccentricity and dramatic strangeness, its Moorish, Byzantine and Mexican Baroque cross-pollination, and disquieting histories of Spaniards spreading Christianity to indigenous people.

Carolyn teaches catechism for young children there. “Kids love my class,” she said, “they don’t want to leave.”

Carolyn remembers growing up and thinking magic lived at the top of the 7,000-foot Kitt Peak in the Quinlan Mountains, in the observatory. Her father helped maintain the mountain road up. “I really thought Santa Claus lived there.”

As for tonight, she won’t be celebrating; for one thing, fireworks upset animals.

Though her ex-husband Begay served, a U.S. Army Special Forces paratrooper in Vietnam with the 82nd Airborne Division, and his grandfather was a code talker in WWII.

“[Joe] doesn’t celebrate any holidays,” she laughs, “I used to celebrate his birthdays for him!”

Soon Carolyn will go home alone, an American Native on a hot summer night.

Brian Smith’s collection of essays and stories, Tucson Salvage: Tales and Recollections of La Frontera, based on this column, is available now worldwide on Eyewear Press UK. Buy the collection in Tucson at Antigone Books, 411 N. Fourth Ave. You can also pickup his collection of short stories, Spent Saints (Ridgeway Press).

This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2023.