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Backstage with Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers

Last night, I had the opportunity to go behind the black velvet curtains at Phoenix’s Celebrity Theater to spend some QT with Arizona’s quintessential independent rock band, Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers.

Not knowing what to expect, I’m fairly certain this was the *mellowest* backstage party in the history of backstage parties. A room full of about 30 people ate Doritos, pretzels and drank four cases of Rolling Rock and Dos Equis [myself included — you know, just to blend in] without ever catching a glimpse of the band. I saw Steve (guitarist), who quickly ran out. PH (drummer) was nowhere to be found 20 minutes to showtime. The bassist was in the parking lot, and Roger was in the hallway looking harried.

“I gotta go memorize the words to my songs,” he told me before bolting for a dressing room.

Not exactly what you want to hear from the lead singer moments before playing the city’s classiest venue. They played 31 songs in 2.5 hours. [Actually, it was more like 30 since Roger forgot at least two verses.]

But that’s part of the fun at a Peacemakers show, where Roger indulges the crowd by drinking whatever flask, beer or other mysterious alcoholic beverage it offers up during the set. He is a true warrior, but the all-night sing-along ends up helping him out later in the show. Everyone realizes this, and musical purists would be alarmed. But in the eyes of fans, it’s part of Roger’s rock star charm. [The band has now played 16 times in Rocky Point at a block party concert they call Circus Mexicus.]

The band is touring for its new album, Turbo Ocho. Check it out, and be ready to hear a mix of heavier rock and a five-man section of trumpets, bongos, and Latin timbales. Vivan los Peacemakers!

Condos come to pristine Rocky Point estuary

PUERTO PEÑASCO, Mex. — A Tempe-based company is building a super-sized condominium project with all the frills overlooking one of Rocky Point’s most fragile marine habitats.

This summer, Canusa Homes will start building five 21-story condos, 30 beachfront homes and a man-made lake where endangered and protected birds nest on their way between North and South America.

The Pointe de Las Conchas project is yet another sign that the marriage between tourism and foreign investors is turning this once sleepy fishing town on its head.

“Rocky Point is probably one of the fastest-growing resort areas in Mexico right now,” said John Alty, the project’s Rocky Point-based sales manager.

Two million tourists are expected to head for Rocky Point this year, he said. But with its proximity to Phoenix and Tucson, its plans for a second airport and a highway project to lure more Californians, “it’s going to be a whole new batch of tourists coming down here,” Alty added.

Canusa is banking on the rush. Alty said the company bought the 24.2-acre site from a local Mexican family in December 2005 for $17 million. The land sits at the end of the main road into Las Conchas and overlooks Estero Morúa, one of six high-salinity estuaries in Rocky Point.

Alty said officials for the Mexican government have visited the site twice without complaint. The company, whose principles are in British Columbia, awaits city permits to start work, he said.

The Pointe will have a manmade lake atop the dune for kayaking and paddle boats, a 37,000-square-foot lobby with a five-star restaurant and shops, and a total of 800 living spaces. Condos on the 8th floor and above will have an outdoor spa, he said. About 400 workers will be brought in from Guadalajara, Mexico, to build it, Alty said.

The prices range from $265,000 for a one-bedroom condo to $3.8 million for a 6,900-square-foot penthouse.

But officials for the Centro de Estudios de Desiertos y Oceáno, or CEDO, are fighting the project with an online petition. Staff biologist Alejandro Castillo López says the mega-project will harm an established nesting area for the least tern, a diving seabird that is endangered, and other animals.

Alty said the company’s biologist found that no least tern nesting sites are near the project. “We will not be affecting the estuary at all,” he said. “Our property does not go down to the estuary.”

Castillo López disagreed, saying CEDO studies show otherwise. He also points to a 1996 study by biologists in Ensenada, Mexico, which found least tern living in Estero Morúa.

While being interviewed at the estuary by a reporter, Castillo López spotted four different bird species, including the least tern. All-terrain vehicles drove out onto the dune, and a yellow Hummer SUV parked out on a sandbar below it.

Mexican authorities have asked for more time to review the project after receiving mountains of data and studies from CEDO. The group is encouraging the use of ecotourism here, like narrated kayak tours of the estuary.

CEDO has helped oyster farmers secure grant money to build restaurants and buy kayaks for this purpose. They say it will be better than condos — a market that at least one local Realtor said is already oversaturated.

The idea that more multi-family housing might come to the estuary disappointed Arturo Candelaria, who came to Estero Morúa with family and friends to escape the din of Rocky Point.

When told that condos were coming to the site, he looked out at the estuary and shook his head at its swollen banks. “So I’m pretty sure they’re going to destroy this place, right?” he asked.

“We come here because it’s pretty quiet,” said Candelaria, 36. “It’s more difficult when you go to the city. It’s not intimidating here — yet.”

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.

A lesson in Border 101

TEMPE — Life gets more and more complicated. People have very little time to focus on extracurricular pursuits. Recycling a soda can and taking shorter showers are simple enough, but the rest is better left to heroes.

Ryan Riedel knows this, and he knows he only has so much time before he must join the masses.

That’s why, after graduating from Arizona State University in 2005, he chose to pursue social change at the U.S.-Mexico border over taking a long-awaited vacation with friends to a ranch in Magdalena, Sonora, or pursuing his dream career as an educator.

He created Border 101, a website and soon-to-be-book that was based upon a bicycle ride through the borderlands.

“If I really wanted to understand what was going on, if I wanted to be able to break through that media wall, I needed to go out and speak with the people who were actually living that border,” Riedel tells TZR .

“People really need alternative news sources to be engaged in alternative ways to be able to respond,” he adds, “rather than the osmosis of false rhetoric that passes for reasonable debate that is going through the halls of Congress and cable news networks.”

Telling the rest of the border story

Riedel says current U.S. immigration rules are not sufficient. More than 4,000 migrants have died in the past 10 years, he says. Since October 2006, 238 migrant deaths were documented by No More Deaths, a humanitarian nonprofit based in Tucson. Border Patrol figures put the number of dead closer to 200.

He says that as a “cyclist for social change,” he has been able to bring the border’s realities to the suburbs in the hopes that a solution to America’s illegal immigration issue can be found.

Riedel believes that, in trying to find an immigration solution, the migrants should be allowed to assimilate and experience interdependence.

“Growing up in suburbia – growing up in an environment in which things are really taken care of – you begin to understand that there are people around you for whom those same things are not taken care of,” Riedel says.

Riedel, 25, launched the Border 101 plan as a 1,951-mile bicycle ride along the border – both sides – from southeastern Texas to the California coast. He would stop at various communities along the way to volunteer.

He called it VolunTour 1951, and its ambitious schedule quickly made him feel burned out.

“Now, it didn’t quite work out,” Riedel admits. “After about six weeks, I just reached an overload. I had no way to process what I was doing.”

So he returned home earlier than intended with a personal task to complete before he could revisit the border.

“From the people with cancers and brain cysts and birth defects and deformities in Mission, Texas, to the really poor with no food down in Brownsville, to the migrants that I had met all the way down the line, I just needed some time to think about it and recover and to really think about what I wanted to accomplish,” he explains.

Riedel says the trip was a soul-taxing event, referring to a passage from one of his favorite authors, Luis Alberto Urrea, who has written several books surrounding life on the US-Mexico border.

“He calls this kind of venture, or any type of experience where you put yourself out on the line and expose yourself to all the good and all the bad—he calls it a soul tax,” Riedel says. “Sometimes your soul is taxed. You just need time to recuperate and be able to love and hug and hang out on your parents’ couch for six weeks before you can go out again.”

During this retreat for self-reflection and recuperation is when the project of a lifetime unfolded. He turned VolunTour 1951 into Border 101, an attempt to use digital media – audio, video, photo slideshows and more – on the Internet to a wide audience, including Arizonans.

Border is in the blood

To understand the challenge, one must understand Riedel’s background. His family is from Nogales, Arizona, and the Mexican state of Sonora. The former is the state’s busiest port-of-entry with more than 275,000 truck and bus crossings in 2006, while the latter is the Mexican state that shares Arizona’s border.

Riedel grew up in a bicultural, bilingual environment, but he never learned Spanish. When he enrolled at ASU, he pursued a dual degree in Spanish and religious studies. He also worked as a student teacher for The Human Event, a two-semester seminar at the Barrett Honors College.

After graduation, he came with the early model of Border 101.org, a website Riedel built where he offers a project overview, documents daily experiences from his border tour and offers readers the chance to get involved.

The current version of the book will be divided into two parts: the east/west and north/south directions taken during the tour.

“I separate Border 101 into two parts because ‘border’ certainly meant something different when I left the physical border,” Riedel says. “‘Border’ came to mean meeting across all lines—social, cultural, national, etc. in a way that was different from a geographical context.”

The book will unveil vivid stories of Riedel’s adventures during the tour. Each story describes different people crippled by similar circumstances. An elderly man broke his leg when he was flung from a train. A middle-aged woman saved her broken toenails to show her kids just how difficult her journey was. A body surfaced on the American bank of the Rio Grande.

All of these people shared one hope: to get to the United States to provide a better life for themselves and their families.

“Once you see something like that, once you see the body that was once a person – the corpse that was once a human being – the impression you’re left with is that not only does something need to change, but it needs to change now,” Riedel says.

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.

Tribal cop sues Border Patrol over high-speed chase

NEAR THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER — A police officer for the Tohono O’Odham Nation was permanently injured after a car being chased by a U.S. Border Patrol agent vehicle smashed into his police unit, a recent lawsuit claims.

According to the three-page complaint from tribal police officer Samu