VIL feb 09 GRID.indd - Tubac Villager

ART, HISTORY AND THE FOODS OF COLONIAL TUBAC
by Shaw Kinsley
Th ese three topics will come eloquently
together when the Tubac Historical Society
holds its March 18, 2009 program at the
Tubac Center of the Arts at 10:00 am.
Jesús García, an education specialist at
the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum,
will present a program entitled, “Foods of
Colonial Tubac : Tantalizing Touch and
Taste,” that explores the ecological tapestry
that made up colonial Tubac. What better
way to ponder local ecology than to eat its
riches?
Jesús will introduce us to several of the Native
American groups of the Sonoran Desert
region including the Seri, the Yaqui, and the
Tohono O’odham, describe their traditional
homelands, and tell us how they employed
the area’s natural resources and how the
Europeans used and adapted these techniques
to survive. Jesús is the principal investigator
on a talented team of researchers working to
by Shaw Kinsley
Tubac has long attracted excellent people, and with excellent
people come excellent collections. I had the pleasure of
looking through a collection of books recently, and found
one that tells a remarkable story. Th e book is Th e Voyages
and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight : wherein is set
down the way to the Holy Land, and to Jerusalem : as also
to the lands of the great Kahn and of Prester John : to India
and diverse other countries : together with many and strange
marvels therein. Th is book, which was purportedly written in
1357, is “one of the most popular and widely circulated books
produced
re-establish the historic mission orchards at
Tumacácori National Historic Park, and he’ll
describe what is happening with the Kino
Heritage Fruit Trees Project. Th is ambitious
project seeks to identify fruit trees from the
Spanish Mission Era by examining Father
Kino’s own accounts, Forty-niner documents
and journals, and the work of contemporary
local ethnobotanists and horticulturalists to
trace the legacy of these fruit trees. So far,
research indicates that the trees included
peach, quince, pear, apple, pecan, walnut,
fi g, and pomegranate. Together, they made
up a portion of the mission community’s
agricultural livelihood that also depended
upon grape vineyards, grain fi elds, vegetable
and pharmacy gardens, as well as livestock.
Th e program will run about 90 minutes and
is hands-on. Participants will experience the
tastes of the actual foods enjoyed by historic
Tubacans and Native Americans alike. Your
appetite is sure to be whetted, and you might
like to have a bite of lunch in one of the area
restaurants after the program.
Jesús Manuel García was born and raised
in Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, México.
He completed a degree in Elementary
Education, (Escuela Normal del Estado)
in Hermosillo, Sonora, and then moved to
Tucson and graduated from the University of
Arizona with a Bachelor degree in Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology, with a minor
in cultural Anthropology. Jesús has been
associated with the Arizona-Sonoran Desert
Museum since 1991. Currently, in his role
as an education specialist, he teaches natural
history programs to the Hispanic community
of the Tucson area schools as well as in
the border region of the state of Sonora,
Mexico. Jesús has many interests including
conservation biology, cultural ecology,
languages, music, gardening, and art.
Th is program is free to members of the Tubac
anywhere in Europe before the advent of printing and one of
the few such books to have had an almost continuous afterlife
in print,” according to Th e Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Presented as the author’s own travel experiences of thirtyfi
ve years, in which he claims to have set out from St. Albans
in 1322 and to have visited the Middle East and Palestine,
continuing on to India, Tibet, China, Java, and Sumatra, the
work was actually compiled from a number of written sources
in what scholars believe to be a monastic library in Liège,
Belgium.
Mandeville’s book is made up of two parts:
the fi rst is a guide to the Holy Land and
describes a number of routes to it. Some
scholars suggest that the book was merely
propaganda to inspire a new crusade to
retake the Holy Land, but others feel it was
one of the earliest examples of the travel
genre, one so detailed in description that
readers couldn’t get enough of it, in spite
of the fact that the author was extremely
economical with the truth. Mandeville talks
at length of saints and relics in Part I and
includes Biblical stories along with stories
that are decidedly secular. Th e second part
of the book takes the reader to the Far
East where the author’s imagination has
full rein. Here he writes of ‘men whose
heads do grow beneath their shoulders,’
of men whose feet are used to shield them
from the sun, of men with horns, and men
with the heads of dogs. He describes the
Speaker Jesús García Speaks at the TCA March 18
Historical Society. Non-members will be
charged $5 to attend. Reservations are a
must because space is limited, so call the
Society today at (520) 398 – 2020 to
secure your place.
empire of Prester John (reportedly a descendant of one of the
Th ree Magi, Prester John was said to preside over a Christian
realm full of riches and strange creatures. His kingdom
contained such marvels as the Gates of Alexander and the
Fountain of Youth, and even bordered the Earthly Paradise)
in preposterously fabulous terms. His imaginative narrative
inspired artists and illustrators to make images to compliment
the text, and the combination of text and image likely account
for the book’s uncanny popularity.
Although there are 31 surviving early manuscripts of the
work in French, the earliest of which was made in 1371, more
than 300 other manuscripts exist in Latin, English, Czech,
Danish, Dutch, German, Irish, and Spanish. Printed versions
date from 1496 and run all the way down to the 20th century.
Th e copy I saw in Tubac was produced in London in 1677,
and research showed this to be an extremely rare edition: only
three examples are known in Britain and the only one known
in the United Sates is held by the Huntington Library in San
Marino, California.
If you are interested in learning more about Mandeville,
his book, and the various controversies that have raged
through the centuries, this Wikipedia entry on the Internet
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mandeville might be
interesting. I was both delighted and amazed to fi nd such
an extraordinary book in our little village. But I shouldn’t
have been, for Tubac has long attracted excellent people, and
excellent people have excellent collections.
Writer and archivist Shaw Kinsley can be contacted at mailto:
sdk878@earthlink.
From the University of Texas Press: A searing documentary of the largest single transnational migration in history.
Words by
Charles Bowden
Photographs by
Julián Cardona
Exodus
11.75 x 9.5 in.
295 pp., 115 duotones
in four sections
ISBN: 978-0-292-71814-2
$50.00, hardcover
with dust jacket