Ciencia Agrobiodiversidad #57. Dr. Jesús García-Yáñez: agricultura en el desierto de Sonora-Arizona.

Agaveculture. The Agave and sotol lessons and Mexican gastronomy. A+ work © Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata

Un gran aprendizaje hablar con el Dr. Jesús Manuel García-Yáñez que trabaja en el Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum. Platícamos de su origen en la ciudad de Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, de su vida como investigador en el Desierto Sonorense y de su trabajo con los cultivos introducidos en el siglo XVII, conocidos como la herencia del Padre Kino. Finalizamos nuestra plática hablando con los cultivos nativos de América como los agaves, con una historia de 4000 años en Tucson y con la importancia de ser migrantes para amar a México, para tener interés en nuestra identidad cultural. Jesús y su compañera Dena Cowen han podido grabar la vida cultural trans-fonteriza y además ejecutando música fusión del continente americano con voces andinas. Los invito a conocer sus aportaciones culturales y sus trabajos científicos en el Mission Garden. Dr. Jesus Garcia gets calls all the time from people who’ve found some long-forgotten plant growing in a patch of dirt somewhere in the hot dry desert around Tucson, Arizona. Over the years, he’s become something of a plant detective, having identified a white pomegranate growing in a grandmother’s backyard, an Asian jujube tree behind a long-closed Chinese grocery store, and quince trees in an abandoned mining town south of the city. Garcia, a biologist and research associate at Tucson’s Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, is not only uncovering layers of the region’s long agricultural history, but also reviving them at the Mission Garden in central Tucson. The roughly four-acre garden exists on the same land where European missionaries started planting orchards and other crops in the 17th century, when Tucson was still part of Mexico and New Spain. These missionaries had brought their trees from all across the world—the Far East, Mideast, and Europe. But over the centuries, their gardens in Tucson dried up. Garcia grew up on a ranch in rural Mexico, where his parents raised cattle, cultivated crops, and tended a backyard orchard of fruit trees brought to the New World by Spanish missionaries. When he came to Tucson 15 years ago, he brought with him a mission to bring old-world trees back to life in the city too. “When we first started looking at the concept of heirloom trees that came with the Europeans, we started wondering, where are they now?” he says. Studying cuttings passed over fences and brought from backyards in Mexico, Garcia was excited to find several descendants of those original trees, growing in different parts of the Sonoran Desert. He spent a lot of time poking around Tucson’s oldest neighborhood, the Old Barrio. “In a backyard, there would be this wonderful fig and then a pomegranate,” says Garcia. “That was one of the first encounters where we realized these trees are here; they are in the community. As I talked to people they’d say, ‘There is this pomegranate in my backyard and it’s never fruited or anything; come and look at it.’” He soon met an old woman tending “an abundance” of fruit trees in her yard—lima, figs, pomegranates, plums, peaches, and apricots. “I realized that when that lady died, the garden would die." Eventually, he collected enough cuttings to start a full orchard. The Mission Garden was born in 2012 at the base of a mountain where Indigenous peoples used to grind flour with bedrock mortars. Teams of volunteers and school groups gathered to pick up shovels and put in hours of hard work planting fruit trees and other crops. https://www.desertmuseum.org/ Fotografía de Dena Cowen #agavecultura #agavelessons #agave #mezcal #mezcalovers #maguey #agavelovers #bacanora #raicilla #sotol #comiteco #agaveducation #agaveducators #agaveSpirits #agaveSyrup #AnaValenzuelaZ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ana-g-valenzuela-zapata/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ana-g-valenzuela-zapata/support