FEELS LIKE HOME

The renowned musician digs deep for her roots—familial, cultural, musical, and culinary.

A native of Tucson, Arizona, with a family tree that extends to Germany by way of northern Mexico, Ronstadt celebrates the Sonoran Desert, which lies on both sides of the border. “It is amazing that a place so roasted by sunlight and heat can summon life in such variety and abundance,” she writes in collaboration with journalist Downes. That variety includes people as well as plants and animals; to live in such a challenging environment, she adds, people must learn to cooperate. Small wonder that Ronstadt detests the border wall, “a scar and an abomination.” Though she seldom rises to anger, the mood of anti-Hispanic racism that the previous occupant of the White House (never named in the text) stirred up moves her to righteous indignation: “It would be more honest if we called our country the United States of Who the Fuck Are You?” Ronstadt is more often inclined, though, to fond remembrances of her ancestral town of Banámichi, Sonora, and her Tucson hometown, with all the massive tortillas and lovely horses to be found there. Interwoven between stories of growing up in a musical, multicultural family are recipes that wouldn’t be out of place in a collection by Rick Bayless or Diana Kennedy (both cited and lauded): A foodie could do worse than her family formula for albondigas. Ronstadt finds connections between past and present in Sonoran cuisine, writing, for instance, “Carne seca is a vivid reminder of the way history in the borderlands remains close to the surface—the seventeenth century is still as near as any Food City grocery in Tucson or tienda in Sonora.” True enough, and lovers of Mexican food and desert places, to say nothing of fans of Ronstadt’s music, will find much to cherish here.

A lively, lovely exaltation of the dry, cactus-studded, indelible Sonoran Desert.