Tim Steller's column: The pain of change marks Tucson memoir, The Molino

About a month ago, Melani Martinez bought a bowl of pasta from Ceres, the shop in El Presidio neighborhood that occupies the space where she spent much of her youth.

“It was OK,” she told me as we walked along West Washington Street in the morning sun Friday.

She wasn’t talking about the quality of the food. She was talking about the experience of returning to the location of El Rapido Mexican Food, going inside, and not feeling a surge of emotion. She felt pretty calm.

“Everything changes,” her father, Tony Peyron, says in Martinez’s book, The Molino, published in September by University of Arizona Press. And while Martinez’s resilient dad seems able to adjust to anything, Martinez feels like she often carries the emotional burdens of the past, including noticing and mourning what’s changed.

There are changes in all the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Tucson, many of them populated primarily by Mexican-American families until recent demographic changes. In some cases, you can label those changes “gentrification,” in the sense that wealthier outsiders have moved in, changing the neighborhoods, and sometimes pricing out the families that have lived there for generations.

But in El Presidio, the dynamic was a little different. By the time Martinez was working in El Rapido in the 1980s and 1990s, the bustling residential neighborhood where her father and grandparents resided had dwindled to just a relative few homes where people still lived.

The transition of the neighborhood to a commercial and office area was already well underway, in part due to her own family’s choices.

“Both my great grandparents and my grandparents were living in this neighborhood, and both sets moved to Menlo,” she said, referring to Menlo Park, the neighborhood west across the Santa Cruz River, and now the freeway. “They probably considered it moving up in the world, I would imagine. You know, they didn’t have to share walls with other people.”

Not only that, but families like her great grandparents’ with nine children, could find some additional space in Menlo Park, rather than the two-room adobe they lived in in El Presidio.

Early life in Tucson

“The Molino” traces Martinez’s path through her early Tucson life, in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as her ancestors’ tracks through the city in much earlier decades. She uses interviews with family members, poems and newspaper obituaries to tell the story.

Other than Martinez, the protagonist is her father, Tony Peyron, the real character who ran the restaurant in his excitable way until it closed in 2000.

“My father, Tony Peyron, tells many stories. All his stories contain some fact and some fiction,” Martinez writes. “Exaggeration is the story, and even though I know this, I believe his stories.”

In one passage, Martinez quotes her father talking about his grandfather Aurelio Perez who founded the place.

“The people loved my grandfather. But it was because he was good to them, you know what I mean? Any time of day, if they needed something from the store, he would go take it to them. Masa, tortillas, anything. He sold the masa for ten cents a pound. TEN CENTS a pound. Can you believe that?”

“And everyone said his was the best masa in town. Because he was the only person in the neighborhood with a molino, and he shared it with everybody. Everybody had credit, man!”

It’s one of the many stories that evoke the neighborhood of the time before, when families stayed for more than one generation, and the people with a molino — a corn grinder — were central to life because they made the masa for people’s tortillas. The grinder was so important that that’s what the family called the business — The Molino, not El Rapido, the restaurant’s name.

In a memorable passage, Martinez imagines how the news of her great grandfather Aurelio’s death in 1959 spread through Spanglish conversations in Menlo Park.

They said it was because of something he ate.

Ay, no!

They say it was the watermelon.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

What watermelon?

Well, he ate a whole watermelon right before, dicen.

What do you mean a whole watermelon?

The whole thing, and a big supper too. Can you imagine?

Ay, no. Then he died?

Sí, luego murió.

Tamales, exhaustion

This time of year, December, could be especially hard for Martinez and her younger brother Ricky, as kids. When they were out of school, they were at The Molino making tamales for customers’ Christmas feasts with their increasingly stressed-out dad.

“It was cold in the kitchen. And then when you’re touching the masa and the hojas that are wet, your hands get like ice,” Martinez said Friday. “And then you’re sitting next to a pot that’s steaming, so that’s, like, very sensory.”

“I remember that sensory feeling, and also, the anxiety that my dad had because of the number of orders.”

By the time Christmas Eve arrived, Tony Peyron had worked so hard for so long that he would spontaneously fall asleep, she said.

The memories are not all sweet for Martinez. Her memoir reflects not just nostalgia for the restaurant and neighborhoods of old, but a mixture of love, anger, confusion and appreciation.

As we talked, we were sitting in a pleasant coffee shop around the corner from the El Rapido storefront, The Dandelion Cafe and Bakery, owned by the same people who own the pasta shop. Martinez recalled that one of the characters in her book, an old friend of her father who died of ongoing health problems while working a shift in El Rapido, used to live in this same building.

The fact that it’s now a coffee shop/bakery is just a sign of change, something Martinez views now as both bad and good.

“My dad would never use that word (gentrification). You know, he uses the word change,” Martinez said. “It’s just good and bad, and there’s no getting around that.”

A neighborhood gone

In The Molino, Martinez notes that when her grandparents living in Menlo Park died about 20 years ago, neither she nor her brother could afford to buy the house. At the time it cost less than $100,000, a steal compared to today’s inflated prices.

“I mean, I still love Menlo. I would love to live there,” she said Friday. “Yeah, even less chance now.”

Martinez describes in the book visiting a Tucson Museum of Art arts festival near the old restaurant.

“One moment, I felt so attracted to their wares, their rich spreads,” she writes. “The next moment I wanted to toss their tables over and chase the vendors out with a bundle of yucca leaves.”

And after visiting the old El Rapido site that same day, she writes, “On the drive home, I broke down. Convinced that no other living souls in my family cry over these things I comforted myself by deciding to just accept it: Weeping is my inheritance.”

A multi-generational neighborhood was there. Now it’s gone.

Everything changes.