LEFT Corn at San Xavier Co-op Farm. BELOW Felicia Cocotzin Ruiz, a curandera, author, and Indigenous food activist in Phoenix.
When Indigenous activists and others pushed forward the passage of the Arizona Water Settlement Act in 2004, securing funding for the Gila River Indian Community to rehabilitate and expand their water infrastructure, Ramona and Terry were able to grow tepary beans more easily—but the younger people had lost the taste for them. As the older generation began to pass away, their business dried up, Terry says. So Ramona went to work teaching the younger generation about these Indigenous foods’ health benefits and history. Now, you can buy their products in Whole Foods, and younger people in the community love the heritage crops. We drive around the property for a long time, Ramona and Terry handing me sweet mesquite beans o ff the tree to eat. They explain how they have a medicine man come and bless the crops. We wind through the fields of Pima cotton to see the few bolls emerging there. It is interesting for me, the granddaughter of sharecroppers, to witness cotton fields as a window to the future, to sovereignty, rather than a trauma of the past. Ramona takes me to the edge of a field and tells me that this was her family’s original 10-acre allotment. Now, she says, gesturing out to a land that seems endless, their farm consists of more than 4,000 acres, most of which they lease from other families—an immense community e ff ort. I wish I could stay all day, but I have to catch my train to Chicago, so I say my goodbyes, clutching the bag of Pima cornmeal Ramona sends me o ff with. Before I go, I gaze around in the stillness. Because the desert is so dry, you can hear everything. And when I make myself quiet, I do. I hear grasshoppers and ground squirrels and snakes and rabbits and hawks and coyotes. Here, you can pass under a shaggy mesquite tree and listen to the village of animals making a home underneath it, knowing that tree can give you life, as well. I’ve never seen so much evidence of life as I do here in the desert, here on these farms, where Indigenous past, present, and futures all meet.
113 SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE
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