The Millstone (Tahona)

“The tahona here in the Mexican garden is essentially a grinding mill made with stones, typically volcanic stones, hard basaltic stones that can function as grinding teeth. It’s used for grinding large quantities of grain. There are two round stones. One is fixed at the bottom, the other rotates around. They are quite heavy so it requires animal traction to make it easier either a donkey or a mule. People can do it, but it's a lot of work. So what it is, is just simply a household grinding mill for cereals, wheat, barley, corn, that would allow you to grind larger quantities for the household. This is a technology that came from Europe. I have seen this style of grinding stones in southern Spain, and in Northern Africa. Some of them I've seen date back to Roman periods. I have also seen them being used in Morocco, in markets where women grind argan pits in very small handheld mills by moving them with their own hands.”

“I remember as a kid, the first time I encountered a mill like this was in the small Sonoran town of Cucurpe. We're talking about the late 70s. My sister became a school teacher and she got a job there around at that time. Back then it was much more isolated from Magdalena, where I’m from. It took almost three hours to get there on a dirt road. My sister had to go there and teach, and every once in a while she would come home and then we had to take her back. The first time I went there, that's when I first saw this apparatus."

"The Cruz Palomino family had this tahona in the backyard, and they were using it. Both my brothers were very, very impressed at that time because not only did they get to see this thing working, but they actually had a donkey that was going around, and the women did this work. They were grinding wheat. And of course, the most amazing thing is that they were making tortillas out of that wheat. Unfortunately, I don't remember seeing the details of how they sifted or prepared the wheat and the flour when they did it. But all I can tell you is that they had the largest flour tortillas I've ever seen in my life. The largest, and the thinnest, amazing. I'm not kidding you but probably two feet in diameter. That's how big the tortillas were, and very, very thin. And the most amazing thing is that the wheat was ground in a tahona. So this family at that time was very, very traditional. They were living off the fields. They were growing wheat, they were growing corn, they were growing all kinds of vegetables. The backyard beautiful, with orchard trees. Citrus, loquats, pomegranates, pears, quinces, peaches in that little mini orchard. They also had flowers, the lady Doña Anna had it really nice and manicured.”

“A few years later, I ended up traveling to places in central Sonora, a place called Huasabas, Sonora, where I actually got to see another functioning tahona. When you go to these towns in central Sonora, you encounter many of these tahonas still functioning. In this case, I also got to see somebody with a donkey going around. In this case, I also got to see somebody with a donkey going around. In contrast, this time they were grinding corn, and the corn they were grinding was popcorn, because they were making pinole, another traditional food, or drink, if you want to call it. It’s a form of a porridge. You can make pinole out of almost any grain, wheat or corn. But this particular pinole is called pinole flor. It’s made out of popcorn. So you grow these varieties of corn that are popcorn. You pop them right on the spot. And as soon as they are popped, and left to cool for a little bit, they throw them in the tahona, and you end up with this ground up flour of the popcorn that is very light and fluffy. You can just pour milk in and eat it like porridge or cereal. This was a little tahona enclosed in a little porch next to the house. There you had the donkey going around. Next door was the fire where the popcorn was being popped right on the spot. In one of the very first programs of  The Desert Speaks  you could see that.”

“Later, a friend and I found another house where a tahona was pretty much abandoned. The old folks had died, and the tahona was abandoned. My friend and I ended up buying that tahona from this family. We loaded into my truck, the two big, very heavy pieces of volcanic rock. We loaded it into my truck and we brought it to Tucson. This one tahona is now installed in my friend's house to this day. It is probably the only one besides this tahona here at the Mission Garden. As far as I know, there’s three installed tahonas in Tucson, because there is one at the Presidio Museum as well. But the one here at Mission Garden is the only one that is used, that functions.”

“As soon as we thought about making the Mexican garden, or a Mexican backyard representing the mid 1800s, we figured we’d have to have a tahona because a lot of these houses that we have seen, the tahonas are part of the backyard. We were hoping to get one from a town in Sonora and bring it and install it, but lucky us, we found a family literally one block away from the Mission Garden. There was a Mexican-American family. The old man had roots in Sonora, I believe in a little town south of Cananea. We have a lot of people in Tucson here who come from that region. Once he lived here, he was probably longing for the old lifestyle that he had as a kid, so probably in his trips, like many of us going back and forth, he brought a tahona. It was actually installed in the front yard of his house, a block away from the Mission Garden. By the time we found this tahona—this lady, I think, came to the Mission Garden, and she told us about it. Unfortunately, I don't remember her name. The husband had already died, the lady was quite old. And I think they were about to sell the house. We found out that she wanted to sell the tahona because they couldn’t take it with them and they didn’t want it to be destroyed. So we got a hold of it. I think we paid $150 for it. Another friend and I went out and took it apart. We took a little Bobcat that we had at the time, and we took it apart, and we brought it literally that 300 to 400 yards to the Mission Garden.”

“The cool thing about tahonas is that it’s a way of grinding grain at a slightly larger scale than just using a little handheld mill. Those are good for two or three kilos of whatever, whether you're grinding greens, corn, hominy, meat, whatever you want to grind, essentially for one meal. Many people still use those. But what the tahona does is grind a much greater quantity. So you can grind maybe now dozens of kilos of wheat or corn or whatever. So you're grinding for a week, or two weeks, with one grinding. And the tahonas would definitely be used to grind great quantities that were coming, of crops that were coming from the fields. So imagine if you had a tahona in your backyard, very likely you had a field and these families would have gone out and walked two or three kilometers down to the river where their fields were. They would have had one or two hectares, no more than that. And they grew enough wheat that would have given them in some cases, a quarter of a ton, half a ton of wheat, and that would last for several months. So these crops had to come from the fields nearby, spread throughout the floodplain of the Santa Cruz River.”