Those who lived in Tucson back in the day may remember their local Chinese grocer. But how did Chinese and Mexican families in Tucson create a blended border town?
An oral historian working with the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center has been collecting stories from the descendants of the first Chinese families who found a home in Tucson.
“928 N. Anita St. is called Barrio Anita, so we learned how to speak Spanish before we could speak English …”
That’s Mary Low Wong; she’s Chinese, she’s Mexican, she’s American — she’s a Tucsonense. Her family has been in South Tucson since the 1880s. Here, she describes the bonds between the Chinese and Mexican communities when she was growing up.
"We knew everybody … I remember across the street the ... family taught us how to make, cook Mexican food, and we were almost like family. We were back and forth in their house, and they were in our house, so we would eat in their house and they would eat in our house …” said Wong.
Wong is one of many descendants of Tucson’s first Chinese families that carved out a unique space in the Sonoran borderlands amid economic and social pressure to keep them out.
Now, her family story joins a collection of oral histories gathered in 2017 by the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center’s scholar-in-residence, Dr. Priscilla Martinez. The project, called "Tucson Speaks! Finding Place, Finding Home," is aimed at preserving the histories of Chinese Tucsonans but also gives them the tools to chronicle their own history, even after Martinez goes back to her home state of Texas.
“Stories tell us about who we are, how we navigate the world around us, especially for communities that don't have … or archives who did not view these communities' history as valuable. And so, oral history is a way to get at that," Martinez said.
Here’s another resident, Raymond Lim, and his daughter Dana, sharing their love of his Chinese-American mom’s Mexican cooking.
"We used to have green corn tamales … that was really good," Raymond Lim said.
"She would make both kinds of tamales, red chile tamales and green corn tamales …" Dana Lim added.
"Menudo, every–pozole," Raymond Lim said.
"And her and her sisters would all gather and they would have tamale making days and the kids would come and help, it was a big family affair," Dana Lim said.
Their family has been in the area since the mid-19th century. His grandmother, Lai Ngan, was a Chinese business owner who eventually settled with her children in Tucson after moving through border towns in California, Sonora and Arizona.
Constant movement was not uncommon for these families at the time – racist and exclusionary policies pushed Chinese Americans from place to place, often following work on the railroads. Take it from longtime resident Anna Don Belton.
From 1928 to 1940 we had lived in … [counting] ... 18 cities. Wow," Belton said.
But Tucson was different. Consider the story of Mary Lee Malaby, for instance. Her grandfather was a wealthy Mexican landowner named Jesus Valencia — the namesake of Valencia Road in South Tucson. So the story goes: Valencia hired a Chinese clerk named Lee Goon to run his grocery store. Lee Goon brought his teenage son Lee Hop to the States to help out. In 1933, Lee Hop and Valencia’s granddaughter, Maria Trujillo, formed a romantic relationship.
But because of anti-miscegenation laws in Arizona, the two couldn’t get married. Despite this, they had a domestic partnership and nine children (that would be Mary Lee and her siblings) and, for nearly a decade, the family lived behind a new grocery store they opened on their own in Barrio Ochoa. Official records don’t show that.
“If you look at census records, you'll see that he lived alone and Maria Trujillo lived with her mother at the time, and they had separate addresses. But if you look at the oral history, they say, no, we live together behind the grocery store and we were a family together," Martinez said.
Ultimately, social pressures and legal complications forced the two apart and the laws prohibiting their marriage persisted even into the years their eldest daughters were ready to get married.
“Both of us got married in Mexico. But I said, ‘Maybe it’s not legal because it’s Mexico,’ so we got married again in New Mexico. We got married twice, George and I got married twice," Malaby said.
"So, Arizona had a law that said you could not get married?" Martinez said.
"Because we’re Chinese," Malaby said.
"Because you’re Chinese. And your husband, George, wasn't Chinese," Martinez said.
"No, [he’s] Mexican. And my sister’s was Anglo. And she got married over there, too, in Mexico," Malaby said.
George and Mary Lee got married again in Tucson on New Years’ Day in 1960, seven years before the Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
Martinez says stories like these defy typical narratives of border communities.
"When we think about the borderlands and the militarization of the border, today we have these very black and white images of who belongs and who doesn't, but for anyone who's lived in the borderlands, that is rarely the case. ... These state restrictions factor into people's lives and their choices that they make as individuals and as families and members of communities, but they don't define them," Martinez said.
"Tucson Speaks!" started back in 2017, but the pandemic put the project on pause — until now. Four of the nine original participants have since passed away.
Robin Blackwood is the chair of the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center’s history committee. She says that as the community loses elders who remember Tucson in the early days, the need to give them the tools to record their own histories grows more urgent.
"And her and her sisters would all gather and they would have tamale making days and the kids would come and help, it was a big family affair. … I actually am trying to pass that tradition on to the next generation," Dana Lim said.
"Yeah, Dana makes the tamales now," Raymond Lim said.
"I’m the only one in the family now that makes tamales and menudo. I learned from my grandmother but it’s a dying tradition … (whispers) It’s a lot of work!” Dana Lim said.
Raymond Lim has since passed away, but his daughter Dana still makes those green corn and red chile tamales from the old family recipe.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to an editing error, this story has been updated to correctly attribute a quote about census records to Dr. Priscilla Martinez.
