“I was born to play the drums,” Beto tells me amid the steam screaming from the espresso machines at Cartel’s in Tempe, Arizona. In between sips of tea, he smiles immensely, gesticulating, dropping his fingers, lifting the digits, and then dropping them again and again against the table’s surface to, of all songs, The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy,” which is blasting from the speakers somewhere overhead.

“I can play rhythm and blues too,” he says, “but I prefer funk.”

I’ve met Beto to learn the story of a Mexican musical legend, a man who made his living banging drums for 50 years, and how he ended up here. He does not disappoint. He begins by describing how he was influenced early on by drummer David Garibaldi of Tower of Power. “Garibaldi is one of the best drummers of funk music. Exactly what he was doing with his right and his left hand I listened to the record and learned.”

Beto learned this way because he didn’t know how to read music. He didn’t need to. “It was just by feeling. And the sound the sound the sound,” he says, simultaneously drumming on the table. “But I used to practice a lot.”

When I asked Alberto about other musicians in his family, he told me there were none. Alberto’s father was a jeweler. His mother helped his grandmother, a glass blower, make vidrio soplado—colorful glass bowls and cups. (The phrase sounds nicer in Spanish). His parents were artists in their own right. For Alberto, the rhythms life created sent him down his own path.

Behind tinted glasses, the smile in his eyes reveals more than words about his love of music: a gratitude toward the thing that saved his life.

“When I was 15 years old, I used to get drunk, lie on the street unable to walk, throwing up and everything. The drums kept me away. I didn’t even think of a drink. When on the other hand, many musicians, they wanna play so that can they drink, so they could do drugs. Not me. That helped me stay away.”

Beto formed the group, Los Monstruos when he was just 18. “We got together playing Beatles songs. Top 40,” he says. They played in local cafes and eventually were asked to appear on a local Guadalajara TV show called Muevanse Todos. “We were doing the most popular songs, but in English. Not in Spanish because rock and roll was played in English.”

In 1964, after recording an album with the label Son-Art, Beto moved to Tijuana. If you were a band trying to make it, Tijuana was the place to be. “In Tijuana a band could play every day because there were, there still are, many nightclubs with live musicians playing like in New Orleans or like in San Francisco” for locals and for tourists.

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My uncle George remembers old stories of Phoenix families making it a tradition to spend much of the summer in San Diego. At that time a healthy chunk of Phoenicians were without air conditioning. He recalls swamp coolers. San Diego represented an escape. “Often moms would go with the kids, without dads,” he told me. “When I lived there I had friends whose families were long time generations of Phoenix families that had been going for years to San Diego. Don’t forget that San Diego was really a small town until recently and attractive for that reason too.”

The tradition continues, even with air conditioning. San Diego, a great place to visit, still shares its beaches with Phoenicians during the summer months. Much like the “snow birds” that vacation in Phoenix during Midwest winters, Phoenicians take flight to escape the oppressive desert heat. The mythical Phoenix burned and emerged from ashes into a fresh body. The roadrunner, on the other hand, runs away from the heat. Perhaps “Roadrunners” is the better name for the wave of Phoenicians who leave for San Diego when things get hot.

Seasons dictate migration. Sometimes it revolves around work.

My uncle George moved to Phoenix, Arizona for work in 1979. He was fresh out of grad school from UC Berkeley. His career eventually took him to San Diego, where today he is the VP, Chief Operations Executive, for Scripps Mercy hospitals in San Diego and Chula Vista, California

The Pérez family stretches out beyond the Southwest. Generations of sons and daughters, grandchildren, great-grandchildren have emerged and become part of the fabric of American life. Today, our family’s doctors, teachers, engineers, public servants, lawyers, musicians, artists, and entrepreneurs define “possibility”–a long road from our family’s beginnings.

As a child my grandmother helped her parents with the pisca, or harvest. Her little hands were perfect for snatching cotton blooms from the unforgiving branches. If she tired her mother would lay her down on burlap and drag her down the line.

My great-grandparents moved like Monarch butterflies, according to the season. Apricots in June. Cotton in August. Cantaloupe in September. Every month, every place according to the fruit.

My people immigrated from the South, escaping the upheaval of the Cristero Revolution against the anti-Catholicism of the 1920s Mexican government. Most of them went through El Paso, some up through Arizona to work in the mines, and most made way to California.

Movement happens. Sometimes it’s inevitable.

I give you the Repatriation Act of 1930–President Hoover’s solution to the Depression. The plan: rid the country of Mexicans, even those who were U.S. citizens. My great-grandfather, who had nurtured a decent life for his family in the east Bay Area community of Pittsburg, California, took them of his own accord (dodging forceful deportation, also known as the free train ticket) to their “vacation home” in Encarnación de Díaz, Jalisco.

When you think of vacation home, think farm. Think of life without running water. Think of life without electricity. Think permanence. They did.

Lucky for me, some fifteen years later, the first of many relatives, unaccustomed to rural life, dreaming of the city he left behind, made his way back to the United States.

Destination: San Pedro, California. Soon more relatives followed. Some went on to Compton, Lakewood and Norwalk. Some stayed there, others went up to Azusa. Some stayed there, others back up to Northern California where my uncle Cruz, uncle George’s father, took harvest from his own backyard.

Fernando Pérez is a writer from Long Beach, California. He currently lives in Tempe, AZ where he teaches writing at both Arizona State University and Mesa Community College. He holds an MFA in Poetry from ASU.

*Photo courtesy of Oggie Dog.

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Do a search and you’ll find articles written about how high school runners here have it tough. Does the heat stop them from running? Nope.

It’s only a dry heat.

Phoenix is an island. It burns.

Here we maneuver from one air-conditioned building to another. Imagine the sun’s rays like raindrops. Pretend you don’t want to mess your hair up. Some people walk around protecting their skulls with umbrellas. They look funny, but hey, they aren’t getting skin cancer.

Those of us without umbrellas trace the shade with our footsteps until we find an open door. Students of mine arrive with sweatshirts to class, believe it or not. The freezing, inside air is a refuge and a potential trigger for a common cold. That might be something my grandma believes, anyway. In truth, the respiratory system is shocked by the sudden change in temperature. Dry temperature.

Spend an hour or two on an airplane or in an air-conditioned car heading toward Phoenix. The precise moment you arrive and step into the day (or night) air, you can feel your skin being stretched, similarly to a deer hide being prepped for leather upholstery.

I like to compare summer in Phoenix to a Midwest winter: people trapped indoors reading, and building up just enough stir-crazy to go outside and build a snowman.

One California winter, my family and I were trapped in our cabin during a snowstorm up in Big Bear Lake for three hours. I’m not bragging, but it was pretty awesome. This pales in comparison, however, to what people in, say, Minnesota have to go through. Imagine “black dust,” or dirty snow blown from 50 mile-per-hour winds. Or don’t.

Here it doesn’t matter if you have shorts and a tank top on, or whether you walk out the door in jeans and a sweater; the temperature shrink-wraps your skin. You experience it best coming from somewhere like California where an 85-degree day can feel like death. Eighty-five degrees in Phoenix is a bocce in the park, with a mojito (in your other hand) kind of day. We pray for days like that. I do.

So why does it feel hotter in areas of higher humidity?

A Bill Nye moment: When there is already a high concentration of water in the air, your sweat has no place to go. In fact, the water in the air condenses on your skin. While you may feel stickier or sweatier in high humidity regions, you’re actually sweating less. But because the sweat doesn’t evaporate, you appear to sweat more. This also means that the process of sweating doesn’t cool you down much, and you feel warmer.

I prefer the dry heat to the sticky feeling I get when I’m visiting California in, say, an El Niño season. This preference extends whenever I’m forced to wait in a long line. I hate waiting. In lines especially.

It’s confusing to look out my window on a sunny day and not have even a drop of desire to “play outside.” The heat burns a hole in my motivation; a certain lethargy breeds in these extreme conditions. This is karma for the times I used to hold a magnifying glass over the ants strolling my mother’s patio.

So here’s a good question: Why the hell does Arizona subject its citizens to wait in line for primary elections in the dead of August? Do they really not want us to vote?

There are a lot of unexplained things in Arizona. Like, why doesn’t every building have a courtyard with a shaded cover and fountain in the center? Plants do well in these conditions and the overall refreshing experience is a natural answer to the dry conditions. Somebody make me city planner for a day.

Whatever the case, the weather doesn’t keep me from casting my vote, but it might not be the easiest experience for some of Arizona’s more vulnerable citizens. Or for someone without an umbrella.

Fernando Pérez is a writer from Long Beach, California. He currently lives in Tempe, AZ where he teaches writing at both Arizona State University and Mesa Community College. He holds an MFA in Poetry from ASU.

*Photo courtesy of mikeyexists.

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She means Los Angeles: Long Beach, Lynwood, Lakewood, Norwalk, Azusa. L.A. County. She even means Orange County. “Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Ángeles” is as widespread as my family, just as populated too.

My great-grandmother arrived in the city’s center as a teenager, dragging a suit trunk and memories of her dead parents from the old country. She arrived by train before Prohibition and began work in the garment district at a sewing factory off Broadway and 7th. She ate from the city’s first lunch trucks-mule carts from which men sold tamales or tacos.

Today, my cousin Carlos sends me a picture from his iPhone of the gourmet trucks gathered in a designated parking lot for second Thursdays, Downtown L.A.’s monthly art walk. He’s holding a Korean taco, just one of the menu options from Kogi. White Rabbit cooks Filipino food with an American and Mexican twist. The food-truck industry is a fusion similar to that of the region’s people. Do the walk. You’ll see.

Visits to L.A. revolve around food. It’s a must-stop at my foul-mouthed grandmother’s house in East Los Angeles, off Bradshawe and East Sixth, for a bean burrito and some good banter. Down the street, my father is at La Carreta, off Cesar Chavez Boulevard, for breakfast with his buddies. The scene, ripe for the start of a joke: A judge, a priest, and a college professor take turns with sections of the L.A. Times, cups of café con canela in hand. My father and his friends have come to know the owners so well they’re treated like family. They have their own key so they can open up the restaurant and get the coffee going.

Across town, a horde of people gathers at Aunt Marta’s. Another baptism, birthday, or football game, possibly all three. The food: chicken mole with a side of macaroni salad, Hawaiian-style. Visits to L.A. are busy, sometimes overwhelming. The rush of traffic has purpose. Aunt Marta’s OK with the fact that I moved to Phoenix for grad school, she tells me. She just wants to know what I’m still doing there post-graduation.

What am I doing? Teaching poetry. Writing. Carving out my own space. Building community over bread-planting bits and pieces of L.A.

Phoenix is like that. It’s a lot of open space, room to spread your arms out and breathe, and a lot of people from somewhere else.

Every day is a clear one in Phoenix. The red rock from Papago Park calls through the semi-smog-free streets. The hiking here is great and easy to get to. The people I know here get together over food or Bocce in the park. They’re from New York, Ohio, Montana, Massachusetts, and California. And even when they’re just here until they piece things together (or not), they leave behind enough to help this young city develop its own sense of culture.

My family has roots here too. My great-grandfathers mined in Wilcox and Clifton in the late 1800s. They took their own bean or beef tacos to work. Today, some of the best tacos I can find in the valley come from a lunch truck parked off McDowell Rd and 32nd Street. It’s a hole in the wall on wheels. These are the best places to eat, places that mimic the comforts of home.

The Phoenix food scene is as old as the city. Lunch trucks have followed workers. And Phoenix has had its own art walk since the ’90s. Down Roosevelt row, old bungalows converted into bars or coffee shops secure a First Fridays crowd. Food truck Fridays is growing too. Jamburritos has created a fusion of Cajun and Mexican. Downtown does not lack art or cuisine.

The drive between Los Angeles and Phoenix is only five and a half hours, if you speed up a little between highway patrol spottings. It’s a short time in the car relative to the time spent in either destination city, but that time counts. Five hours is enough time to think about the people you are leaving behind.

For me, it matters which direction I’m heading. Radio stations are better in L.A. When you’re heading east, the good music fades and static sets in at first sight of all those windmills. They signal that it’s time for This American Life podcasts or a random shuffle from the iPod.

The weather is open for debate; it depends on the season. Most of my siblings have birthdays in June. Mine is in March. Growing up in California, they had barbecues, pool parties, water balloon fights. I had movie night. In the past six years, I’ve celebrated my birthdays outdoors. March is a great time to be in Phoenix.

The desert landscape blurs the border between California and Arizona. Los Angeles might be a melting pot, but it hasn’t always been so kind to the blending of cultures. L.A. has grown. It is what its citizens want it to be. And in all that sprawl, LA is leading the way as a cultural center in the West. Phoenix, despite a wave of depressing laws and a culture of privatization, is experiencing growth in its communities, in its art, and in its population of people who look to L.A. as an older brother who can lead by example.

Phoenix is close enough to visit my older brother in L.A. over a weekend. But it’s far enough that I don’t have to deal with day-to-day family hiccups. It’s best this way. Phoenix gives me room and has room to grow. Heading in either direction, I always say, I’m going home.

Fernando Pérez is from Long Beach, California. He currently resides in Tempe, Arizona, where he teaches writing at Arizona State University and Mesa Community College. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Faultline, Crab Creek Review, The New Mexico Poetry Review, and Furnace Review.

*Photo courtesy of planetc1.

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