How Tucson Helped Me Connect With My Mexican American Identity

When I was 17, I used to skip school. Instead of turning left toward school, I would head right to Saguaro National Park. I’d roll down my windows, feel the dry desert air, and cruise along the eight-mile Cactus Forest Drive. Somewhere around mile six or seven, I’d pull off at Javelina Rocks, climb the giant rock formations, and find a spot that fit my body like it was carved just for me. 

Back then, I thought I was just a girl needing an escape. What I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t necessarily running away, rather, running toward something. These small acts were connecting me to something bigger: my family’s history, the Sonoran Desert, and the spirit of Tucson. 

Sometimes I wondered what the city looked like when my great-great-grandparents lived here. On my dad’s side, our family roots in Tucson go back generations, with records showing we were here by the 1820s. Though they later moved to tiny mining towns across southern Arizona, Tucson always remained home.

Thinking about the past made my problems feel smaller. Not irrelevant, but I felt less lonely. Whatever I was going through wasn’t the end of the world. Tucson has a funny way of making you feel at home, even if you’re only here for the weekend. It’s not uncommon to go to the grocery store and bump into someone who knows you, or find that the stranger you just met is somehow connected to your cousin, best friend, or tía.

Nowhere is this interconnectedness, especially within the Mexican American community, more palpable than in the history of Barrio Viejo. Dating to the late 19th century, it is one of Tucson's oldest neighborhoods. Once called Barrio Libre, it was home to a primarily Mexican working-class community, along with Chinese, Black, and other immigrant families. Most Mexican Americans with ties to Tucson knew someone or had a family member who lived there. My Nana Guzi, a friend of my grandmother’s, lived there across from the market. 

Mauro Trejo, a seventh-generation Tucsonan, tour guide of Trejo’s Tucson Walking Tours, and board member of the Tucson Presidio Trust for Historic Preservation, which oversees the Tucson Presidio Museum, for one, believes that understanding Barrio Viejo’s history is crucial to understanding Tucson.

“What people from my parents' and grandparents' generation remember about [Barrio Viejo] is the sense of community that was there. Everyone was related to everyone. Everyone knew everyone,” Trejo says. “You could go away for weeks at a time and leave your door unlocked and nobody would bother a thing because everybody knew everybody.”

After years of disinvestment and neglect by the city, residents were displaced in the late 1960s and early 1970s under the banner of urban renewal. Much of the neighborhood was bulldozed to make way for developments such as the Tucson Convention Center.

Today, Barrio Viejo survives in pieces: in the preserved adobe homes, prayers left at El Tiradito, the mini chimis at El Minuto Cafe, and in the feeling of “home."  “[That feeling] came out of that neighborhood. Its roots were from there,” Trejo says. “It helps explain who we are today and how we developed because Tucson is still a really big small town.” 

Tucson remains a place where people find their way back to themselves. One of those people is Guadalupe “Lupita” Tineo, owner of Yolia Botánica, a spiritual shop rooted in Mexican and Indigenous traditions. Originally from Sonora, Mexico, she began reconnecting with her heritage in 2018 after searching for a sense of belonging, especially after growing up undocumented and often feeling spiritually displaced. 

“Tucson became my home after I moved from Mexico and over time, I started to see just how much our people here were also yearning for connection: to land, to culture, and to each other,” Tineo says. “I opened Yolia Botánica to help fill that gap, to create a space where Mexican and Indigenous traditions could be honored, practiced, and remembered. This city became the soil where that vision could grow.” 

Tineo says that practicing Indigenous rituals and medicine is an act of reclamation. Tucson, one of the longest continuously inhabited regions in North America, has been home to the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui peoples for thousands of years. “This desert was once honored, understood, and cared for, long before colonization drew borders or built cities. So when we gather to heal, speaking in Spanish, Nahuatl, or O’odham, we are weaving our memory back into the land,” Tineo says. “Every ritual, every prayer, and every story is resistance. And it is also remembering."

For Tineo, Tucson holds what she calls “radical resilience,” and it shows up in the people, mountains, and scent of creosote after a monsoon storm. “My view of Tucson has definitely evolved, especially after visiting other cities that don’t hold the same essence,” she says. “There’s something sacred here. My culture is visible, alive, and present in everyday life. That visibility brings me comfort.”

Learning more about Tucson has helped me reflect on the work I’ve been doing in my own life as I reconnect with what it means to be “Mexican American.” It is understanding all the parts of it: the good, the bad, the displacement, and finding your way home. That’s why I believe every Chicana should visit Tucson, whether you have ties here or not. There’s something here that speaks to us, that sees us. If you’re searching for a piece of yourself, I have a feeling Tucson might be holding it for you.