The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, learn about this group of friends who turn their passion for sustainability into a thriving community.

(Tito) The mission is like how we build an empowered, equitable barrio centro.

And our focus is health and wellness.

(Tom) Take a walk with a decades old hiking club.

(Nancy) We don't just do hiking.

We have picnics.

We have downtown events.

We go to the university.

We do some tours.

(Tom) And see how these people harness the cooking power of the sun.

(Joe) It really is fairly easy.

And it's not something you need to do every day.

Those sort of little collective actions really will add up if we all start to do those.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And first up, you'll meet members of the group Flowers and Bullets.

Don't let that alarm you.

These folks are a bunch of friends who started out helping each other with backyard gardening projects.

They've become a vibrant community.

In fact, they even bought an old school and turned that into a farm and a health and wellness center.

[Music] We're here to celebrate, give thanks to the land, give praise to the energy for the history that has taken place here.

This has been a long, long time in the making.

The school was abandoned for quite some time.

If you all look to the north here, you'll notice that this building is under a lot of construction, demolition.

As you see, we're working with the land.

You can always check our website flowersandbullets.com.

See how you can help out, support, contribute... [as the voice fades, a balmy drone soundtrack intensifies] We'd drive by this school all the time and it's been abandoned since 2008 and we're like, "Dang, like imagine like all the possibilities that can happen there."

And it's like, "Yeah, right, you know, it's huge."

We have all these vacant lots.

We're on 22nd Street, so on 22nd Street and south of 22nd Street, that's where you get like more dialysis centers, more smoke shops, more predatory lending, more liquor licenses per square mile.

So we knew that it was important to do something.

It was either like join another non-profit, join another community group, or take like the resources and the knowledge and the skills that we've been getting for so many years and implement them.

We just feel that coming from these communities, people from the outside look at them as run down, as ugly, as ghetto, as those neighborhoods, you know, that are underserved.

We just feel that like, coming through these hardships and seeing everything that goes down in these neighborhoods, we can still create something beautiful.

In 2011, we started with a t-shirt company and it's like, "Okay, how can we create images that are just like powerful images?"

At that time, we're already kind of growing corn, squash, beans, the three sisters in my backyard, trying to experiment with growing, right?

Because of Mexican American Studies classes, they're like, you know, your culture is important.

Like if you want to know who you are, where you come from, like plant corn, plant maíz.

And I was like, challenge accepted, you know?

All right, y'all, when y'all ready, we're gonna come circle up by the milpa over here.

As I was like smudging you guys, I was giving lots of blessings to y'all and the journey that you guys are in, we're all on a different journey.

I've been learning more about my lineage and my Indigenous practices through my community.

And so I've been in the process and journey of becoming a healer.

Welcome, this is your space.

So I really appreciate everybody being out here.

These seeds we brought up from Oaxaca.

This is a yellow corn.

I just appreciate y'all for being here.

Pass it over.

You want to say your name, who you are?

Hi, I'm Aiden.

He/Him pronouns.

Yeah.

I like how everything's connected, you know what I mean?

The rainwater to the goats, you know what I mean?

And then the manure, everything's intertwined, you know what I mean?

Kind of like life, you know what I mean?

I feel good to be here, man, representing for you guys, you know what I mean?

I admire what you guys are trying to build and create.

And I thank Mother Earth for donating these, and it's gonna metamorphosis into something more beautiful, you know what I mean?

My name's Araceli.

I live in the neighborhood and this farm has become very special to my kids and I so we're really excited to see what comes out of it in the future.

Also want to acknowledge my tío, my tío Pony who passed away.

Passed away on Thursday.

Just thinking a lot about him, his memory and who he is and how special it is for me to to be able to do this.

Like I said, we're all so disconnected from our lineages, from our food, from our people, from our health, our wellness.

So, this is what's going to make us healthy again.

Being connected to our food, to our lineage, to our culture, hearing the ancestors.

I kind of got involved in 2013.

At that moment I was seeing Tito and Jacob installing gardens.

We went to the same high school.

They're a little older than I am but they were my mentors.

I was in the Mexican American studies program, and I met them through that movement when Arizona tried to ban ethnic studies.

Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer just approved a bill banning ethnic studies classes in public schools.

They said that they were teaching us how to overthrow the government?

and that they were teaching us how to hate white people.

So that was the rhetoric.

Oh and then like that they were giving us free burritos.

There's like a daily show that they came and they interviewed the guy.

They would every week go out and buy burritos and feed these kids.

What?

You slip your burritos to kids don't you?

Why would be giving food to our youth be something that frowned upon?

I was the last year, the last graduating year that was able to take the courses.

they didn't know we were seeds.

Actually being in the Mexican American Studies, that's kind of when my eyes were open to the food apartheid that's happening in our neighborhood, and the relationship between my family's health, and like the area that we're growing up in right and the stores that are available to us.

So I wanted to go back to those traditional kind of ways of growing food.

At the time I met Tito and Jacob they had just started the shirt company called Flowers and Bullets.

We were helping Tito out with his garden at the time.

Jacob wanted to start a garden.

And then I just kind of naturally saw the way that when people came to a meeting or when folks were sketching out the next Flowers and Bullets shirt design, people were really asking questions about the garden, or people were curious about the water catchment system or just you know just the things that they didn't know about they were really curious about.

When I started planting these corns, and my friends would come by and say, "Dang, what are you doing?"

They'd come by just to hang out, just to kick it, just to find a place to feel safe, you know?

And we'll start talking about the garden, we'll start talking about the corn.

That got folks curious to start a garden in their house.

And so slowly, we built something like 20 gardens in the span of four weeks.

We were just really passionate and young and had all the energy in the world, you know?

So I was just like a knucklehead in the neighborhood or whatnot, just kind of stopping by.

I would check out Tito and Jacob's house every now and then, realize that they were growing food and they started telling me a little bit more about the food, a little bit more about in depth of why they were doing it.

Should I move this plant or should I leave it?

Just let it grow around it?

At that time, I didn't really have a full-time job, so I was kind of just, yeah, coordinating a lot of like the home gardens.

When I started doing this work, I started feeling really good, really empowered, taking a lot of that knowledge home to my own family in my own house.

I was about to have a little boy, so I wanted to change a lot of my living lifestyles.

I wanted to be more around like-minded people that was more positivity and created something for my community and for my son.

People were like, "Cool, I have a garden, but what do I feed it?"

And so then we were like, "Oh, maybe we need workshops, soil workshops."

Programming was developing as folks were curious about topics.

She was like, "Hey, you guys are talking about culture, you guys are talking about resistance, look at these cool images... But the people are genuinely interested on the gardening and the farming aspect of it.

They're asking genuine questions like, I think we have something here."

So that's when kind of like, Flowers and Bullets was born.

Flowers is the art, that beauty, the families, the culture, the traditions, and bullets is like that struggle, the realities, the hardships, the resistance.

The mission is like, how do we build an empowered, equitable barrio centro?

And our focus is health and wellness because we know that health and wellness to us, is like learning your culture, is learning your traditions is planting this corn, is being able to address some of the social and economic issues that are happening here in the community, right?

A lot of us that are part of the program, part of the collective came to school here.

This school was two meals a day for our kids.

This was youth sports for our kids.

This was employment for the community.

This was just a safe space.

And from one year to the next, everything was just gone.

And one day we got a letter at our door that said, "Hey, Penske, the trucking company was going to buy it all.

Buy it all and make it into a parking lot."

And I looked at Tito and I was like, "What the heck?

Did you know about this?"

He's like, "That's my old school."

And then we just decided to first tell our group.

At the time we were just a little group of maybe... ten, twelve people that would meet consistently every weekend to put in work on each other's gardens.

That's what it was.

And everybody was from the neighborhood.

So we were like, "How do you all feel about this?"

And they're like, "Well, what can we do?"

We're like, "Let's just show up and ask questions."

Someone yelled like, "Raise your hand if you don't want this crap."

At that moment in time, TUSD turned to us and said like, "Well, what do you all want?"

And it took us almost two years to submit the final proposal.

"The I passes unanimously."

Five years later, six years later, we go back to try to buy the property, and we got another unanimous vote.

So I think we're just doing it.

It's another validation that everything we're doing is just right on the, we're on the right track.

None of us have ever owned a nine-acre land.

And so none of us have had this huge land to grow food.

And so it came with a lot of learning curves for sure.

It was finally a space that we can make our own for our families that look like us and do the work that we know that was needed here in Barrio Centro.

Last night I came around like, eight-thirty, and she looked like she was really feeling uncomfortable and looking like she was getting ready to give birth.

And both of them were born and they were out kind of just, you know, running around, kind of, starting to nurse.

Big old hawk just flew into this tree.

There's a big hawk in there.

Looking at the land, so much of our work is just observing.

It's just watching, it's just hearing.

Literally, if you take a step back, the community is already telling us what the community wants.

It's up to us to hear it, and implement it and do it.

But same thing with the hawks and the lizards, the horn toads, the birds.

It's like, we're really paying attention.

We're seeing what's landing, what's here.

And it's like, okay, how can we create more of that and continue to add to that habitat?

Working with this water, working with these animals, working with these elements, working with these crops and crop production, it's not just going to heal ourselves, heal our community, but also heal the land, restore the land.

It was part of our agreement with TUSD that we had to demolish the building.

We demolished two-thirds of it, kept two buildings.

One of them is going to be used for like administrative workshop space.

Another one is going to be for like seed saving, seed lab, things that are goin to be related to the farm space.

Luckily our job, our work is land-based.

So we started on the land, we started farming, we started with agriculture, and slowly we're working into the building.

[sound of drumming and shaker] [voice starts singing] We're caring for these plants, these seeds, these animals in a very intentional, a loving way... that is what our culture and our traditions show us and teach us.

We're a Nahua people, we're Indigenous people.

A lot of us are from Mexico or from the south somewhere, you know, but migrating to the north, migrating to the United States, you literally put so much of your culture and so much of your customs and traditions behind you.

The way that we plant is ceremonial, you know, the way that we harvest our animals and our livestock here is ceremonial and it is a way that brings an aspect of humanity and spirituality into this space.

So I did grow up in a ranch in Mexico.

And yeah, we were growing sugar canes, corn.

I remember just walking down the field with my abuelito and I did take it for granted.

I know in the beginning my mom was a little confused.

She's like, "I literally walked miles "to get away from this, "to give you a better opportunity, right?"

It really fed my soul.

And bringing my mom here, and my abuela here, she was also disconnected as well.

She was forced to be disconnected.

And so it's been really great seeing her grow her food as well.

Not too long ago, we had our ten-year celebrations.

A lot of community groups are not around after a few years, People of color, buying back their old neighborhood school, giving it back to the community, making a safe space for the community, doing a crop production, green spaces, things that are gonna be important for the future.

I think we don't even see how impactful and how historical it is what we're doing.

Members of the Southern Arizona Hiking Club have been exploring the trails in Arizona and beyond for 64 years.

And with over 500 members and dozens of hiking guides, they offer a range of outdoor opportunities every day of the week.

I've been a member since 2010, August of 2010 and I've been a guide for the last seven years or eight years.

So it's 1.8 miles and you do go up a little bit on some rocky terrain and some hills.

But we'll go slow and easy and we'll wait at certain places so everybody can catch up with us.

I got all the good stuff on the shoes.

I just don't wear the shoes in the house.

And I don't wash my clothes with her clothes because the last time she got a sticky in her bra.

She really layed into me.

I've been in the club over 20 years.

Me about 20, 25 years.

15.

And I think I joined in 2013.

The newbie.

Somebody introduce to this hiking club.

And I love it because I go with them everywhere.

Even out of state hike.

Our members can join for only $25 a year.

We have about 60 guides.

I would say we usually have probably two or three hikes on the schedule every day that our members can choose from.

So it's anywhere from a stroll on the sidewalk all the way to climbing mountain peaks.

Usually about twice a year we have we have a hiking trips that could be like a weeklong the Grand Canyon Canyonlands, Olympic National Park.

In the summertime we have wonderful trips to Maine, to California, to Washington, Oregon.

So I get a a little pin or a badge or something.

We have a good time out here.

We are the oldest hiking club in Arizona and one of the oldest in the country.

This year we are turning 65.

So I'm telling people the club is old enough to be eligible for Medicare.

There's a deer right below this rock.

We've been with the hiking club now a couple of years, and we just come out here and enjoy a little meal after a couple of hikes.

And had I not joined the hiking club, I would have never seen the most beautiful parts of Tucson.

I've seen more of this state than I ever dreamt I would ever see.

We don't just do hiking.

We have picnics, We have downtown events.

We go to the university, we do some tours, all kinds of things to entice people to get outside and keep young.

You know, it might be hard to believe that the first documented example of a solar oven goes back to 1767.

Now a couple of centuries of innovation have improved these ovens, made them a practical cooking tool.

And these days, and Tucson folks are using these ovens in their regular routine, not only to save energy, but to keep the heat out of the house during our very hot summers.

(Narrator) You have fresh and wholesome ingredients, a good selection of spices and delicious recipes.

But what about the energy that will power the cooking as part of your preparations?

For some residents in Arizona, it's as easy as getting out of the kitchen and turning to the sun.

Literally.

This star is an essential cooking tool that is clean, abundant and free.

(Sonya) I don't think of it as a hobby.

I just, it's just the way I cook.

(Narrator) Sonya Norman started her sun powered oven exploration nearly 20 years ago when she heard about an annual solar potluck event in Tucson.

She wasn't able to make it to those gatherings, but the subject did spark an interest that perseveres.

(Sonya) I remember one year my father was asking me, what could he get the kids for Christmas?

And I didn't have any good ideas.

I said, but I know what you can get me for Christmas.

And he bought me the solar oven and I've been using it since.

Any time before the clouds come are good times to be using a solar oven.

It's hot outside.

You'd have clear blue skies.

Might as well take advantage of all that sunlight.

(Narrator) Joe Black also likes to use a solar oven when possible.

He found his model on Craigslist.

(Joe) I actually kind of grew up around solar cooking because I grew up next door to Sonya, and for as long as I remember, she always had a solar oven.

And so it was always something that interested me.

And when I moved out and got my own place during college, I actually went out and bought myself the solar oven before I bought myself a microwave.

(Sonya) Oh, yeah.

Get some of that oil on them.

Go ahead and open that Joe.

And then, you know, if you get it.

Oh, my God, that smells great.

(Joe) Oh, wow.

(Sonya) Okay.

(Narrator) Both cooks say the process is simple, although you do have to pay attention to the sun's direction.

Be on standby to move the ovens when necessary.

(Sonya) Is there anything you think we should do with the rice, Joe?

Do we need to angle it better or steeper?

(Narrator) It is very convenient than doing everything in the kitchen, but worth the effort they say.

(Joe) Solar cooking to me really just seems like the most natural thing in a place where we have just an abundance of sun.

It's really advantageous because during the hot summer months you don't have to actually turn on your stove or your oven that would heat up your house more.

(Narrator) That's one of the messages that's being promoted by participants at the annual solar potluck.

It's held at Catalina State Park, north of Tucson.

(Pat) We're going to be serving up some hot Italian sausage, mild Italian sausage with a delicious blend.

My name is Pat Murray.

This is the solar potluck which has been going on for about 40 years.

Actually, the 38th one because of COVID.

But I'm the chair of Citizens for Solar, Solar Guild.

Two organizations really blended into one to do both solar cooking and to do PV Solar, which is producing electricity from the solar panels.

We are an educational group and we do everybody from 5 to 98.

Solar ovens are angled stainless steel that takes the rays of the sun directly inside the insulated boxes and then a plexiglass type glass goes over the top to hold the heat in.

So these ovens right now are probably running about 375 because we've been opening them and serving hot Italian sausage and sauce.

But it's simmering right now.

So the same thing as my mom's pot of spaghetti used to do on kitchen, kitchen stove where you can let it go.

She always let it go three days and we just kept adding sausage and mushrooms and meatballs.

You try it.

(Attendant) It's delicious!

(Pat) Good, good, I'm glad you thought so.

(Attendant) I love it.

(Pat) There are ovens that are expensive, and there are ovens that do the same thing but are not expensive.

The ones that we're using here are sometimes in the price range of $350 to $400.

(Cecilia) I have been interested in solar energy for many years.

In fact, I have solar panels on my house already and I have been very attracted to the entire environmental field, including water reclamation, use of greywater.

It's kind of a natural for me to be drawn into the whole field of solar energy.

I think solar energy is really important, particularly for Tucson, for the state of Arizona, and it's important for each one of our backyards.

We should have been really ahead of every other state already.

Arizona should be leading the way.

(Narrator) The efforts have been simmering for decades, and proponents hope to inspire a new generation of solar cooks.

One tasty dish at a time.

(Joe) I guess I'm just kind of an environmentalist all around.

That kind of pervades everything I do.

It's my work and it really is fairly easy and it's not something you need to do every day.

Those sort of little collective actions really will add up if we all start to do those.

(Narrator) Back at Sonya Norman's house, she and Joe Black are serving a feast with all the fixings.

They've invited a group of guests.

(Sonya) I ended up with a meal that seems to be pleasing everyone.

One of the dishes is empty and I like to feed people, so it's really fun.

(Michael) This is my first solar cooked meal, and so I was really impressed with this.

And so that's what I really enjoyed about that meal, it had taste to it.

I'm from the Hopi reservation and, you know, and we kind of have our own system of cooking, but I can see that being incorporated into that because right now, the way the cost of propane fuel is and even electricity now is getting really more and more expensive.

I am ready to start dinner.

I'm going to grab my spoon and [Spanish].

(Tom) Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

You can go out and buy a frisbee for $5 on the used rack and come out here and play this course for free.

I just got back from surgery and it's just a great way to stay competitive, stay active and just stay healthy with a lot of friends and people that are amazing to be around.

You know, it was one of those things.

I played it once and I was like, this is it.

I love this.

This is great.

I think I'm going to do this now.

It just brings people together from all different walks of life, races, you name it.

If you can throw a frisbee, you can play.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.