[soft music]
(Jesus) This thing has been burning for 5 hours,
but we don't want to let it cool down.
we want to keep that heat as much as possible.
So we're just going to get ready
to cut a couple of these in half. Nice!.
There's a lot of things to keep in mind.
(Liz)Tucson's annual Agave Heritage Festival celebrates the
ecology, culture and culinary tradition of the agave plant.
(Maegan)A lot of our O■odham people, our O■odham youth
don't know our traditional ways.
But this moment, we're reviving it.
We're living it, we're breathing it.
We're living in this process.
We put together this program to demonstrate hands on
the roasting of agave.
That involves finding the agaves.
Some of them, we grew them here at the Mission Garden.
Some of them are in people's backyards.
Some of them were in the neighborhood near the
the Mission Garden, where we had to ask permission, of course.
[soft music]
Here we're going to try to
break this thing in half..
It's going to be a challenge.
(Jesus)And today was the day to prepare the agaves,
clean the leaves
and prepare what we call the piñas
or the cabezas, the heads, the hearts of the agave.
We put a firepit since early this morning
to essentially heat these rocks.
And then we throw in the agave heads and we covered it up
and it's going to be there for three days.
And then when you when you covered it,
we just use an old washing machine covered it. In Mexico.
They used like a hood of a truck.
Anything that you could find. Cover it.
put some dirt on top of it and you're done.
One person can do it in 15 minutes.
(Maegan)After three days of just being covered up.
Undisturbed, we just leave it alone.
Let it do its thing. This is a lot of work.
You have to go and collect the the agave, the heads or piñas.
Will come back on Sunday evening.
[bright guitar music]
(Maegan)Clear the dirt off,
take that
back end of the washing machine off.
In a little bit.
You should be able to smell it.
(Maegan)Take the leaves out.
Take the rocks out.
And our hearts should be a beautiful,
brown roasted piece of food. (laughs)
And then we're going to get them out
and we're going to see what happens.
We want to taste them. And eat them.
You're going to chew on it and suck on it
and spit out the fibers, you do not swallow the fibers.
It's like sugar cane just like that.
[bright guitar music]
My father as a young man was Mescalero.
He was making mezcal, mezcal bacanora,
to sell in the town in a place called Baviácora, Sonora.
He talked all the time about how mezcal was made,
and every once in a while
he would bring chunks of roasted agave.
And it's basically like candy.
It's a it's a it's a morsel.
It's something that any kid
would just devour because it's just good stuff.
I feel fortunate that to me,
this is a flavor of my childhood.
[trolley klaxon]
Agavi experts and enthusiasts travel to Tucson
to participate in events happening across the city.
Tequila is just one type of mezcal is a mezcal
industrialized with one type of plant,
one type of yeast, and one industrialized process.
(speaker)The first one was a pineapple based tepache,
with cinnamon and clove, and I used agave syrup
instead of cane sugar as the sweetener.
(speaker) They■re catching water
and collecting microbes that ferment in the leaf
bases as that water trickles down the leaves.
So you actually have a plant that's a fermentation microbe
collector.
Don't think of agave just as a plant.
We have a very intimate relationship
with our landscape through food
and with the external landscape,
but also with our internal landscape.
Sometimes they cannot be explained.
The flavors, the aroma as they are rather felt, deeply felt.
You cannot know a product
only after you have tried it many, many different times.
And people, when I ask them, what does mezcal taste like?
They say all the time.
Maguey, maguey
It's a common name that we use in Mexico for the agave plant.
You cannot put into grammar what a specific kind
of acidic flavor or lactic flavor.
taste like to really understand and make the beverage.
You really have to feel it in your body.
(slow, soft music)
(Maegan)In our language, in
O■odham language, Cuk-Son means black base.
There's black rocks at the bottom of A Mountain.
And so that's how it got it■s name.
I'm learning my language in this process,
how we call things by our language.
I'm learning the Spanish version as well,
but it just makes me want to walk through this door
that I have no idea is on the other side.
I have a sense of it.
It's an ancient, ancient
room that I'm I'm asking to be led into.
Her, this tremendous eagerness to learn.
But even though she comes
from the reservation and from a rural area,
her upbringing is in the city and it's been for me a pleasure
to try to get her to rope her in and to do more.
(Maegan)By doing this, I'm bringing it back.
I'm breathing a little bit of life into it,
and I have a son so I can pass that on to him.
And he may have children in his in his life
and he can pass that on utilizing
my time here on Earth for people that aren't even born yet.
That's what I hope is that it keeps going.
And I think that's been very satisfying for me and for her to
try to combine this knowledge, the things that she knows
from her grandparents, from her mother,
and she only knew them too, from stories talking
in the kitchen table.
Agave should be recognized for its survival, it■s durability.
It's giving-ness to humans and animals.
And if we keep growing, if we keep talking about it,
if we keep being compassionate to our environment
and encouraging these plants to grow here and everywhere,
we'll have, we'll have food.
We can feed people.