Mexican American Oral Histories

Gabriella Cázares-Kelly: My name is Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, G, A, B, R, I, E, L, L, A. C, A, Z, A, R, E, S, hyphen, K, E, L, L, Y, and the first A in Cázares has a Spanish A, the tilde going bottom, left to right.

Aengus Anderson: Great. And where and when were you born?

GCK: I was born here in Tucson in 1982.

AA: And so what my listeners cannot see is that we're at the rodeo grounds, and we were just talking about how you hadn't been here before. I hadn't been here before. A bunch of wagons outside. You said that got you got some memories going.

GCK: Right. So I was born here in Tucson, but I grew up on the Tohono Oʼodham reservation, which is southwest of Tucson, southern Arizona.

AA: The San Xavier District?

GCK: No, further west.

AA: Okay.

GCK: It's the Pisinemo District, is where I'm, the district where I'm from, but the village that I'm registered in is called Kupk. And Kupk and the village of Pisinemo are pretty close to each other, probably a half an hour away by car. Well being here at the history or the the the Tucson Rodeo Parade Museum, I think is what we're at. Okay? And so there's all these wagons, or some covered wagons, and some really fancy, like what you see in the Wells Fargo advertisements. And I was once having a conversation with my mom. My mom was her name is Rosella Cázares. She that's how she pronounces it, Cazares, and originally Juan. And she was born in Kupk, in that small, tiny village where we're originally from. And when she was a kid, and even even in my young childhood, my family still had a wagon. And my great uncle, you know, I'm only 42 so, you know, we're in 2024-

AA: And there was wagon.

GCK: It sounds really-

AA: And this was not like a wagon that someone had left around. It was like this thing, might be used?

GCK: It was a, it was a wagon that we used, you know. And I remember my great uncle hitching up the wagon. And, you know, it was usually for supplies. My siblings remember playing on the on the wagon and trying to, you know, keep up or jump off and different things like that. So, I was once having a conversation with my mom about wagons. And, you know, she was reflecting on her childhood and going the back roads to what is now Sells, Arizona and from Kupt. And, you know, it's a very, it's dirt roads, it's, it's really, there's, it's really bumpy back. There's a lot of mesquite trees. So it was a two, two day trip for them to go from the Sells, I'm sorry, from Kupt village to Sells. They would spend the night, and then they would come back. And so they would stop at a at the first home in a village where they had friends and, you know, community, and they would, you know, spend the night there. And so she was talking about that, and she just casually mentioned that sometimes it was a covered wagon. And in all of my years of hearing about the wagon and my brothers and my sister and my great uncle, and even when I was, you know, young, I never saw a covered wagon. To me, covered wagon was Little House on the Prairie, like, what? What? Why would there be a covered wagon? And it, it, it was so shocking and surprising to me and funny. And I, I turned to my mom, and I said, Why? Why would we have a covered wagon? And she, she looked at me, kind of in surprise, and she goes, it's for the shade. And, you know, when, when I was a kid seeing my great uncle, you know, hitching up the wagon, you know, it was, it was usually to carry something, you know, fence posts and and, you know, different things from the garden or, you know, some, some type of thing that he was doing, no, because it was just, you know, backyard work. It was, it was what you would use a pickup truck for. But my mom, you know, a whole day in the sun to go, you know, to another location to spend the night there and then to come back. It was a surprise, and it really transformed the way that I think about wagons, because, as a Native American person, thinking about covered wagons that never included us.

AA: No, like that's rolling from the East Coast, West, right? Yeah, it really short circuits the idea of like, oh, this is just a machine.

GCK: Yeah. The other thing, I think is, really, I was talking to somebody recently, so I'm the County Recorder. I am, you know, the, an elected official for all of Pima County. I'm responsible for the voter registrations, 630,000 registered voters. But I was, someone recently was talking to me a reporter, and they started asking about my childhood, and they were really surprised to find that I grew up in this really rural community, in a really quiet community. And I started talking about the community where my grandmother, where I spent my where I spent my summers, and it was dirt floors and kerosene lamps, and we had a wood fire stove, and you had to, you know, start, start the fire from from nothing, often, and it was tending the garden and showering in in the yard under a hose that had sardine can, it's a sardine can with poked holes that was nailed into the side of the of the shower stall that that's where their soap was, and then a can that had holes on the bottom, and we put the hose in there. So, yeah, and so I just think that that's really kind of a beautiful imagery, like, that's actually my happy place. I think about the beauty of where we come from and what community means to me. That's it, it. I'm always transported to Kupt, Arizona here in southern Arizona, and most people have no idea. It's the most beautiful place in in our region.