“Only the sunlight holds things together. Noon is the crucial hour: the desert reveals itself nakedly and cruelly, with no meaning but its own existence.”
–Edward Abbey
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Ofelia Zepeda occupied an old, high-ceilinged office on the ground level of a century-old brick building at the University of Arizona. She wore a necklace of beaded coral, and her hair rolled gently over her shoulders, willowy and white. Behind her desk, she’d decorated with a print by the Hopi artist Dan Namingha and a map of Arizona, detailing its waterways, both of which were lit softly by the glow of clerestory windows.
Zepeda is Tohono O’odham but grew up away from the reservation, in a cotton-farming community near the remains of a settlement known as Casa Grande, which sits about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix and is thought to have been built in the fourteenth century. This means she spent her childhood in close proximity to the historic trade route that connected the farms of the Salt, Gila, and Santa Cruz Rivers to fishing camps along the Pacific Coast, and from there to Nahua-speaking peoples in the jungles of Central America.
Evidence of these continent-spanning ties persist in archeological sites across the Sonoran Desert in the form of iridescent shells, macaw feathers, copper bells, and ornate, reflective discs decorated with a mosaic of iron pyrite. Despite being separated from the Aztecs by more than a thousand miles, the ancestral peoples of the Sonoran Desert even played a version of the game ullamaliztli, where a heavy rubber ball was knocked around an earthen oval court using hips, knees, and elbows. More than two hundred of these ball courts have been found across southern Arizona.
Life magazine called Speedway “America’s ugliest street” because of the visual cacophony created by its enormous, overbearing signs.
Much of that heritage was invisible when Zepeda was growing up in the 1950s. Her family was surrounded on all sides by the cotton fields that then dominated agriculture in Arizona, ultimately smothering four hundred thousand acres of the state. Almost all of the crop was hybridized Egyptian cotton that had been introduced to Arizona around the turn of the twentieth century rather than the Sacaton variety that Zepeda’s ancestors had been cultivating for millennia. “Most everybody worked as farm laborers,” she remembered, “that’s how you had to provide for yourself and your family.” In the summertime, cotton fields would gradually turn the orange earth of the vast expanse around Casa Grande green, before exploding into white every fall. The only sound out in the fields was wind rustling cotton bolls and the occasional whirr of a passing truck.
“We were one of those families where no one had any experience with any kind of schooling,” Zepeda said. When she first enrolled at a rural public school, she didn’t speak any English. Nevertheless, she excelled. Her brother was equally bright, particularly at math and art. “He was one of those people that had that natural gift,” she said, but since their parents needed him to work, he dropped out after only a year or so of high school. “I have other cousins that are like that, but they never went to school.” Zepeda described these circumstances in a measured voice. There was no obvious regret, just a recognition of the way things went for so many O’odham kids, then and now, no matter their aptitude for education.
In the end, Zepeda became the first member of her family to receive a high school diploma. This she attributes to chance. “I just happened to be in a school where a teacher found me, or I found a teacher. In that era, there were federal programs to increase the number of minority students going to college. So myself and my cousin, a counselor put us in one of those programs and we got pre-college training. We got on that track. My cousin, she went to a technical school, and I went to university.”
Arriving in Tucson was a shock compared to the rural environment she was used to: beyond the sheer size of the city, which seemed to be growing by the day, subdivisions spreading rapidly away from the university and toward the Santa Catalina Mountains, there was the neon madness of Speedway Boulevard. Soon after Zepeda started college, Life magazine called Speedway “America’s ugliest street” because of the visual cacophony created by its enormous, overbearing signs: Saxon’s Sandwich Shoppes (“Our Food is Rated G: Great”), Precision Motors, Drive-In Liquor Window, Andy’s, Golden Pheasant Restaurant, Ranch Center.
Soft-spoken and patient, Zepeda buried herself in books. In quick succession, she earned a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degree. Though originally interested in sociology, Zepeda was convinced to try linguistics by Kenneth Hale, a scholar at MIT who had grown up in Tucson and been invited back to serve as a guest professor for a few semesters. To Zepeda’s surprise, the charismatic Anglo who wore a prominent belt buckle commemorating his victory in a high school bull-riding competition spoke excellent Tohono O’odham. He explained to her that he’d picked up the language from a teenage friend (a famous polyglot, Hale was said to be able to communicate in dozens of tongues, including Diné, Hopi, Wampanoag, and the Australian Aboriginal language of Warlpiri). Recognizing that few academic surveys of the Tohono O’odham language had ever been undertaken, Hale encouraged Zepeda to study the formal components of the language she’d been speaking for her entire life.
“I didn’t realize what I was doing was special,” Zepeda told me. She described the generations she has instructed in O’odham since publishing A Tohono O’odham Grammar, both university students and reservation teachers who hoped to develop literacy in and then share their mother tongue. “I saw it like a job. I didn’t think what I was doing was unique until much, much later when I’d meet people I worked with early on—the impact of being able to read and write their own language.”
With only around fifteen thousand speakers in the United States and Mexico, O’odham is designated as an endangered language. Zepeda’s work has helped create a framework for its restoration. The Tohono O’odham Legislative Council began building a language center at a tribal community college in 2020 and the language is also offered at Ha:ṣañ Preparatory & Leadership School, a charter high school in Tucson’s Rincon Heights that serves Indigenous students from across the city, along with commuters from the Tohono O’odham reservation (whose largest town, Sells, is about an hour away).
Was it possible…for someone outside the lineage that dates back to the ancestral Sonoran Desert peoples to really belong here, in a landscape characterized by such profound extremity?
While Zepeda’s manner had initially felt to me as somehow out of sync with the hustle of the university, the longer we spoke, the easier it was to understand her as an integral figure in Tucson. Her whole demeanor suggested immovability, centrality. “Tohono just means ‘desert,’ ‘desert people,’ ” Zepeda said. “That’s who you are, what you were made to be. You can’t get away from it.” Outside of academia, she has published three poetry collections, much of her creative work focusing on what it means to be not just in the Sonoran Desert, but of it. “Cuk Ṣon is a story. / Tucson is a linguistic alternative,” she wrote, in a poem called “Proclamation”:
The true story of this place
recalls people walking
deserts all their lives and
continuing today, if only
in their dreams.
Was it possible, I wondered, for someone outside the lineage that dates back to the ancestral Sonoran Desert peoples to really belong here, in a landscape characterized by such profound extremity? Could those who have sought to master the Sonoran Desert with air conditioning and aqueducts really call it home?
Zepeda responded to that line of questioning with typical equanimity. She described an annual ceremony the Tohono O’odham perform when the monsoon rains of late summer hit, which seeks to cleanse the earth and “prepare it for another cycle.” Before European contact, she said, this ceremony “was for the O’odham and everything around us, the animals and all the other people that might be somewhere on the earth.
After contact, all those people are included. You cleanse the earth for everybody. When things change dramatically—it doesn’t rain, the patterns change—they recognize it and say, ‘We’re not living right.’ ” That sense of continuity between the personal and global, she said, has only become more salient in recent years. “With the droughts and wildfires, people will say, ‘We’re not living right.’ Not just the O’odham, but everyone.”
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From American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest by Kyle Paoletta. Copyright © 2025. Available from Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
