29 Jun Fatherland

Tucson sprawls from west to east. Stripes of asphalt spill from a black basalt mountain marked ‘Alpha.’ The city derives its name from the Pueblo Indian earth epithet, Ts-iuk-shan, the gate of western hills that the sun departs through each evening.

An urban concrete grid is superimposed over a wild, deadly garden which brims with fierce flora that evolved for self-defense and self-reliance against the sun’s daily assault and rain’s cruel neglect.

This town is a ghost town delineated by four mountain ranges, and also arbitrary frontiers. People die of thirst on their journey here from the south. The granite boundaries and the sandy floor of this place hold evidence of the past: ancient settlements, agriculture, climate migrations, and more recent colonial displacements and genocide. The valley swells with vast geologic and human histories and is now occupied by more than one million people. The living and the living dead cohabitate here.

This is the land of my recent paternal ancestors, where my father grew up, and so did I. There are few nostalgic comforts here. Each year of my childhood different configurations of my broken family moved from home to home, from one ugly impoverished neighborhood to the next. Each year they uprooted and transplanted my body, belongings, and imagination to new small patches of hot, barren earth.

This is a place without life-sustaining water where the aquifer has been completely consumed and water is delivered via an engineered project spanning 300 miles. Here mountains are disemboweled for their mineral contents, then they are abandoned as hollow craters.

Having spent most of my childhood in this desert, countless personal stories have been pressed into the dirt here. Prehistoric footprints of paths I walked before I was fully myself. Fossils of ways I have been. And my own migration under duress.

When I return to Tucson I am flooded with memories, both pleasant and traumatic. My mother died here five summers ago. She evaporated like rain from the ground after a monsoon.

It is Father’s Day and I have come back to the fatherland. Toxic patriarchy is a rattlesnake and its venom also runs through me. But below the pathological drive for absolute colonization and destruction of the wild, imperishable resource can be found underfoot. I sit in the pelvic bowl of the desert like a cactus wren in her thorny nest. Sonora – the sonorous desert valley – sings to me. She echoes with dove song and the deep belly laughter of enduring friendships. She coos in my ear “you belong here, too.”