(Tom) Hi, I'm Tom McNamara.

Welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

On this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different now.

We love documentary film and not just our own.

We would like to use this platform to showcase others in our community who are producing great work.

Today, that's what you'll be seeing.

Stories produced by University of Arizona students under the guidance of Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Lisa Molomot.

We spent a day with them in the field and heard what motivated them to make these short documentaries.

So please stay tuned.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC Learn the local history of Tucson's Chinese grocery stores.

(Patsy) Home was the grocery store.

And mom and dad worked hard, 18-hour days, and I realized that was probably the most important thing for immigrants in Tucson.

(Tom) The hidden secrets of Tohono O'odham Pottery.

(Reuben) We always try to work on pottery in the full moon.

The idea is that when the moon is full, just like a woman, she's fertile during a certain time of the month.

(Tom) And layers and layers of history in Tucson's oldest neighborhood and more.

(Lydia) Gentrification is something that's very pressing here, where the identity of this neighborhood has changed.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC (Lisa) I'm a documentary filmmaker.

I live here in Tucson, and I also teach courses at the University of Arizona.

And I work on documentaries because I like telling true stories.

I like not knowing necessarily what the story is going to be when I start.

And most of all, I love learning about new things.

Things that I know absolutely nothing about when I start, and by the end, I feel kind of like an expert.

Pima County and Desert Archaeology are working on an archaeology project here in town.

Archaeology is and has always been about research and providing that research for other archaeologists.

But now, in more recent times, a big part of archaeology is public engagement.

And so it's actually in the law that when you do archaeology, you have to do some forms of public engagement.

And so Pima County and Desert Archaeology decided to do some films, some documentaries.

Out of that came this idea to maybe contact the university and perhaps do an internship with students to work on some projects regarding the archaeology that they're doing.

These students have been wonderful.

Really hard workers and came into the filming projects with their own ideas.

We're here today to film reclaimed water that's happening here on the river because Fiona, who's working on this project about the river, wanted to actually see some of the mechanics of how the reclaimed water goes back into the river.

(Tatum) Currently I'm a BFA Film and Television student at U of A, so we basically are focused more on the production area of film.

I think I definitely discovered that I really, really enjoy documentary filmmaking and it really is its own unique art form.

I had thought initially that it was really similar to fiction and that you're just filming what's going on and cutting it together, but it's really its own unique form.

I think it's really, really camera intensive, which I didn't really realize, just because you're kind of left to capture whatever's happening in front of you and the only thing you have control over is the camera.

(Tom) The following stories were produced with editorial independence by University of Arizona students under the guidance of documentary filmmaker Lisa Molomot.

Funding was provided by the Regional Transportation Authority and the City of Tucson in collaboration with Pima County.

♪ SLOW ACOUSTIC GUITAR TUNE (Scott) The theater is owned by Pima County it was bought recently with the idea of restoring it as a historic property.

This whole area, which is vacant now, was for many years part of this residential, commercial area along Meyer Street.

And included storefronts along Meyer Avenue and then a few things along Simpson here as well on the south.

The archaeological remains of those things are still in place.

We assume they were to some extent.

And the desert team, Homer and his crew, are out here doing test excavations to see what is in fact out here.

What needs to be avoided.

And potentially, as we learned this morning, what poses problems for the architects that designed the wall that goes around here.

And the engineers that will build it.

- That's tumbled in, you're telling me?

- Yeah.

♪ SLOW ACOUSTIC GUITAR TUNE ♪ (Homer) I'm sitting on the wall of a Chinese grocery store that was built sometime between 1909 and 1919.

And you can see the A Mountain or Sentinel Peak rock foundation.

We know the store was here up until at least 1962 when it was called the Ace Store, Ace Grocery Store.

And we're working at a historic site, dates from the 1880s onwards.

And so these are all things that were used by people living in the last 100, 150 years.

So we find things like marbles, proof that little children were playing here.

And then you find things like a button, a pencil lead.

This is a piece of printer's type that would be used to put down the letters that would appear in a newspaper.

Down in the barrio, almost every street corner had a Chinese grocery store.

♪ BOUNCEY GUITAR TUNE (Richard) Why did people come to Tucson during that period of The Gold Rush?

Families were sending the men and their family out to look for work.

The whole idea was you make money, send it back to China, and that's what they survived on.

Why they came to the Tucson area was after the railroad was finished, the Chinese people, some of them stayed.

And they started to do farming.

(Homer) And about 400 of the Chinese railroad workers just decided to stay in Tucson.

And they did things like open up more restaurants, laundries, grocery stores.

Some of them were farmers growing the produce.

(Richard) And they were able to grow the vegetables that are unfamiliar to this area and then sell it to the folks that were living here and to the O'odham people.

(Homer) In 1882, the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

And that limited immigration of the Chinese.

There was a great fear that they were going to take jobs away from Americans and in Tucson from Mexicans because they would agree to work for lower wages.

Also, they were sending their money back home to China, and that made people mad.

History is an interesting thing.

You find out a lot of unpleasant facts.

(Richard) Because you can't come in through the front door, you come in through the back door, which is Mexico.

(Homer) And so throughout the neighborhoods in Tucson, almost every street corner had a Chinese grocery store.

♪ SLOW MOODY GUITAR TUNE (Francis) My grandfather came to Tucson and owned a grocery store at Stone and Fifth.

The building is no longer there.

It was demolished, and it is a housing development of some sort.

We have no record as to how my grandfather came from Guangdong to Tucson.

We think he just came into Mexico.

Remember, there was the exclusion of Chinese at that time, so they can't come over into the United States.

During that time, there was no border.

It was just like an open street.

You can just walk from one side of Mexico to the United States.

♪ SLOW PIANO MUSIC (Patsy) The grocery stores in Tucson were so important to the Chinese immigrants in the 40s and 50s.

Home was the grocery store, and mom and dad worked hard, 18-hour days, and I realized that was probably the most important thing for immigrants in Tucson, is to stay together as a family.

We're different because our skin color, what we eat, what we look like.

And so when you have that little clan behind the grocery store, you're making money.

You're also meeting neighborhood people.

The funny thing is, I actually grew up speaking Spanish, you know.

So growing up, most of us thought we were just little Mexican kids running around because we spoke Spanish.

(Francis) Tucson was a very small community.

Everyone just walked.

People did not have cars, and so the grocery stores were just very closely together.

In one block, you will see two or three of these grocery stores, and they were very easy for immigrants to learn to run the business because they really didn't know how to speak the English language.

In the Depression years, there were a lot of people who did not have money.

The grocery store person would write a little ticket or a little account of all the items that they would buy, and so at the end of the week or at the end of the month, they would come in and pay whatever the bill was.

(Patsy) That was the biggest thing about a Chinese grocery store, was giving their neighbors credit.

(Richard) Throughout the whole Chinese population here in the States, the kids growing up in the grocery stores, they need to learn skills and they need to be educated.

That was the big objective.

♪ MUSIC ♪ MUSIC (Richard) The Chinese, because they have the grocery stores, would allow credit to be taken.

That really helped people through this period.

And so when we were trying to raise money for the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, one of the things that started to come back was that, "Oh yes, I would donate because the Chinese people helped our family back in those days when we really needed some help."

(Anna) I started off as a biomedical engineering major, so I did two years of that and then I took a Gen Ed where I made a small documentary type video and I really liked it so I changed my major to the BFA Film and Television Program at the University of Arizona.

I just really liked being able to tell stories.

With engineering everything is kind of like there's a right and a wrong answer for everything but with film, I mean it's like life, like documentary is like life you can figure it out and you can film something going in with an initial idea of what it's going to be like but then it can change as you film.

I worked on the Chinese immigration video, the pottery video and the pit house video.

I learned a lot about the just the Indigenous people that used to live here and how they are trying to protect their culture and their land.

♪ GUITAR MUSIC (Reuben) When gathering clay, we always leave an offering.

What I was told was, leave a strip of red cloth near the clay source.

But today things have changed so much that people bring whatever they can.

Maybe they have a coin in their pocket or maybe a little bead or something.

But the idea is just to leave something instead of always taking.

We never work when we have inner or outer conflict.

You know, something is happening in your life, something bad, something good.

It'll reflect in your work.

So we always try to work when we're feeling good and we're not angry or we're not resentful or anything like that.

And we always try to work on pottery in the full moon.

The idea is that when the moon is full, just like a woman, she's fertile during a certain time of the month.

There are some O'odham people that would only work during the full moon because that's when everything was fertile.

These are called ha'atakut.

It means that they're a tool that's made for making pottery.

And we just call this hodai, which means rock.

When a child is born, in the O'odham way, they're blessed by a medicine man.

And the medicine man will give a little potion of clay and with a little bit of some other materials like feathers.

And then they would ask the mother to feed the baby the clay.

And that was used to connect the O'odham to the land so that they would know where they came from and they would always remember that.

Because these clays are natural clays, they're not pure, they have a lot of extraneous material.

The O'odham would use cholla ribs or even dry saguaro ribs because it fires hot which fires fast.

The clay that I used could not survive a regular kiln fire and it would just collapse because the heat is too hot.

I've been doing this since the early 1990s, full time.

So it took me a long time to work up that intuition or that experience.

It's just an intuition that you build and you create.

(Tom) Hi, just a reminder, all of the stories you're seeing on this episode were filmed and edited by University of Arizona students under the guidance of filmmaker Lisa Molomot.

(Fiona) I took a class freshman year and learned about like urban renewal in Tucson and so that was a topic I was really interested in exploring.

I think the thing that is so special about documentary is you can take the seed of an idea and you can really explore that the more you talk to people and the more that you spend in a place.

And you can really uncover the mystery of that seed and it kind of blooms into something like really amazing that you never really expected.

The project that I worked on was the project about urban renewal.

I learned a lot about how repetitive and cyclical urban renewal is.

When we talked to Lydia Otero and we explored the area of Barrio Viejo and understood how urban renewal impacted that area, I learned about how in South Tucson this is starting to happen again and how we really need to like respect like where people live and not try to change that space.

♪ ACOUSTIC GUITAR TUNE (Lydia) So this place, my paternal grandmother, Altagracia Otero, lived here in the early 1900s and how do I know was because her husband died and she had to make a living for herself and she sold bootleg alcohol and was arrested and her address is here.

My parents were born in Tucson.

Their parents were born in Tucson and my father's family in particular goes back to the 18th century here in Tucson.

My parents were both born in this Barrio here, sometimes referred to as Barrio Viejo.

Most Tucsonenses who have lived in Tucson for more than 50 years have a connection to La Calle in this place.

♪ UPBEAT ACOUSTIC GUITAR TUNE The number of people that were on the streets was just a marvel but the educational system had taught me that it was not cool to speak Spanish in school and we were prohibited from speaking Spanish to each other even on the playground.

And so coming here felt different.

It felt like we were in a different place, a place where we belong certainly, where we had a demographic majority.

I knew a lot of Chinese Americans who spoke Spanish.

I met African Americans who spoke Spanish.

That mixture was very, very unique.

That area too, I must say, was the most multi-ethnic community ever in Tucson, ever.

♪ SLOW ACOUSTIC GUITAR TUNE There was a program that was passed by Tucson voters in 1966.

Merchants in downtown Tucson thought it was going to bring more people downtown and at that time the city is just trying to reinvent itself as American.

They didn't want tourists to come to Tucson and say, "Hey, Tucson's a Mexican place."

They wanted to change that.

My mother used to live in a house that was here.

In fact, she was born in this house.

I think people wanted the parking.

(Amy) My ex-husband's childhood home, they had apple trees and apricot trees and it was right where one of the parking lots of TCC is.

You know, people started realizing that these are historic buildings and those buildings they could save.

They went from being almost worthless.

They're probably selling for millions now.

(Lydia) This is the house that now we know is the Diane Keaton House and you can see it was a series of smaller units that were combined into a big house.

I remember it when it was a lot of Adobe units and they didn't have roofs on them.

They were pretty worn down.

The newspaper ran a story on Diane Keaton selling this house for more than a million dollars.

(Amy) I read something in a magazine or saw something on TV that was talking about this neighborhood and talking about Tucson as being, I don't know, you know, when publicity like that gets out, it ruins towns.

(Lydia) In these economic changes, the people that have moved in here and that are able to preserve their house, they're just a different kind of people.

We don't see any people walking here anymore.

There is no markets that are here.

Used to be, but there's nothing that would attract people from the south side, people that are like my family to come here other than to walk here and see these streets.

I drive my sister who's 82 through here and we just reminisce and there's this feeling of nostalgia around this all, but we know that we own a piece of its history and I'm glad that it's preserved the way it is, but it's not the feel and it's not the people that I remember who once lived here and it's not the energy that it doesn't have the energy that it once had.

This is a very beautiful scene.

I love all these cactus.

So one day me and Alfie were walking and these loose pieces are on the ground.

I planted them in my yard.

Their parents are one of these cactus from the old barrio.

I think the issue of gentrification is something that's very pressing here where the identity of this neighborhood has changed.

I think it's scaring people that live south of here that this is a model of what's going to happen to their neighborhoods.

What's interesting is some neighborhood groups are coming together.

The Barrio Coalition is coming together and they're aware of what happened here.

It motivates them to preemptively move and voice their concerns.

♪ UPBEAT ACOUSTIC GUITAR TUNE What we see first is the transmission of intergenerational knowledge where the mother is conveying to the child that not to forget history.

The parent is also saying look beyond what's there.

That if you look beyond these structures that now comprise the Tucson Convention Center that there's more history there.

(Lisa) I started my career in Los Angeles and then I moved out of Los Angeles and I feel like the day that I moved out of Los Angeles is the day I became a filmmaker.

The minute you leave New York and LA you actually are forced to make, for better or for worse, you're forced to make your own filmmaking and for me it was for better.

Any place in America is a place where there are interesting stories.

So I think that as long as the world continues to have interesting stories you can be anywhere in the world and be a filmmaker.

I think at this point in my career, I'm really big on mentoring.

And that's a big part of what this project has been.

So I have been their supervisor on the projects they're working on, but I've been a mentor.

We talk about career stuff.

We talk about what happens after the University of Arizona.

And I've been doing this long enough to have seen lots of different variations on what careers can look like, and there's not one career path for anyone.

And so I love talking to the students about possibilities, like what could they do next.

Given their interests in film, what they want to do, how can that become a reality for them?

It's just been a wonderful and rewarding experience for me.

(Tom) Our thanks to Lisa Molomot and those fabulous filmmakers for sharing their stories on our show today.

And thank you for watching Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you again next week.