What the River Knows: Stories of Culture, Place, and Practice along the Santa Cruz River is a series of documentary and participatory interventions to uplift and celebrate the Santa Cruz River as a living entity and source of practical knowledge, regional identity, and cultural memory. The project uses listening sessions, fieldwork expeditions, and multimedia story productions to explore folklife and cultural traditions in communities along the river in Pima and Santa Cruz counties. By “communities,” we mean existing towns and pueblos, but also communities formed by shared practices, labor, activities, interests, and traditions for whom the river and Southern Arizona watercourses have served as meaningful forces.
In recent decades, efforts to restore and revitalize the river have brought attention to and restored health to its riparian ecosystems. The 2013 upgrade to the Pima County’s wastewater reclamation facilities, for instance, brought cleaner water to the riverbed, replenishing groundwater aquifers, creating conditions for the return of diverse aquatic wildlife (including five species of fish), reducing odors, and creating a place for human recreation and enjoyment. In late 2017, the Gila topminnow, a tiny Sonoran Desert native fish, was discovered in the flowing stretch of the river in Tucson after a 70-year absence. Still very much threatened, these ecosystems demonstrate nonetheless a form of “resiliency” that is closely connected to the everyday expressive cultures through which people make sense of life along the river in the present but also as a shaper of the memory that informs a sense of place. For example, adobe bricks were long used as a building material for homes, churches, and other structures in the Santa Cruz River watershed. Time and erratic weather patterns due to climate change can erode such structures. Preserving these places depends on the intangible heritage of craftsmanship—passing the trade from one generation to the next—as well as understanding the science of durability. In recent years, collaborations by park rangers, preservationists, scientists, and adobe makers have employed trusted traditions and new solutions to restore structures of cultural significance in places like San Xavier and Tumacacori and elsewhere along the Santa Cruz.
What the River Knows aims to bring into the light folkways and practices that create the rich cultural landscape along the waterway and often go unnoticed or underappreciated. Specifically, the team is working to document stories of severance and repair, including: the occupational folklife of wastewater treatment plant workers bringing treated water to the river, long-standing foodways traditions dependent on riparian areas; trash as artifact; the use of buffelgrass, invasive species, as a building material in new forms of adobe; cultural memories of the mesquite bosque along the river, and more.
The program runs from September 29, 2025 to October 1, 2026.
Alex LaPierre of BorderLandia shares cultural history with the SCRiver Documentary Team.
Photo by Bear Guerra
Along the Santa Cruz south of Tubac, AZ with Sonoran Institute’s Claire Zugmeyer.
Photo by Bear Guerra
Team photographer Graham Donohue at the SCR headwaters in Southern Arizona.
Photo by Kimi Eisele
Looking south across the US-Mexico border vehicle barrier at the SCR headwaters, Dec. 2025.
Photo by Kimi Eisele
Funding and Partnership
Funding for What the River knows is provided by Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area, Southwestern Foundation for Education & Preservation, University of Arizona Southwest Center and the Mellon Foundation.
Speakers include Alex La Pierre (Borderlandia), Claire Zugmeyer (Sonoran Institute), Eamon Harrity (Sky Island Alliance), Angelantonio Breault (Reconciliation on the River) and Kat Sacoman (Reconciliation on the River).
Partner organizations include Sonoran Institute and Reconcilation on the River.
Documentary Team
Kimi Eisele
Kimi is a writer, editor, folklorist, and multidisciplinary artist whose work illuminates kinship between people, cultures, plants, animals, and places. She manages SFA’s communications, curates programs and exhibits, and serves as a writer and editor for BorderLore, SFA’s online journal of borderlands culture and heritage. She is the author of The Lightest Object in the Universe (Algonquin Books,
CO-EDITOR Ruxandra Guidi has been telling nonfiction stories in audio and print for more than two decades. She is a freelance editor and contributor to various narrative podcasts and magazines. She is the co-founder of Fonografia Collective, fellowship impact and engagement manager for Altavoz Lab, and she also serves on the board of El Tímpano, a local reporting lab amplifying the voices of Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrants. As a former assistant professor of practice and assistant director of the Bilingual Journalism Program at the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism, Ruxandra advised students and taught audio storytelling, feature writing and freelancing for years. In 2023, she won a Soros Equality Fellowship to produce the anthology podcast Happy Forgetting about racial justice in America, and last year she received a Fulbright grant to study and teach narrative audio storytelling in Madrid, Spain.
FILMMAKER Clarice Bales was born and raised in Tucson and has worked as a producer, camera operator, and production coordinator on independent documentaries and narrative films. The documentary “Tastebud Memories,” which they worked on as a camera operator, was nominated for a Human Interest Rocky Mountain Emmy award in 2019. Their directorial debut short film, “La motochorra,” premiered at The Loft Film Festival in 2021 and won the Narrative Short Audience Award. She is currently working with a new, queer/women/trans led production collective called ‘& all’ that challenges the outdated norms of production work and uplifts marginalized identities in film.
PHOTOGRAPHER/VIDEOGRAPHER Graham Donohoe is a Tucson-based photographer, originally from the Driftless Area near the confluence of the Mississippi and Black rivers. As a Digital Image Technician (DIT) and camera operator, he has collaborated on projects with National Geographic, Wild Kingdom, the National Wolf Conversation, and several independent documentaries. His photography examines local wildlife, flora in urban microclimates, spatial relationships in the built environment, and uses optical distortion to explore representation and recognition within irreal picture planes.
FILMMAKER David Fenster is a filmmaker based in Tucson, Arizona. His films link the cultural and historical with the ecological and mystical. His work has been shown by the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, PBS, the New York Times, HBO, and many other museums, festivals and media outlets. He was awarded the national Edward R. Murrow Award for his film Water Harvester: An Invitation to Abundance.
PHOTOGRAPHER Roberto (Bear) Guerra is a photographer whose work contemplates our connections to each other, to the natural world and to the places we call home, while calling attention to contemporary social, cultural and environmental issues. His editorial and documentary projects have been published and exhibited widely, and he often collaborates with media, non-profit, arts organizations and other institutions. Amongst other awards and recognitions, he has been a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado – Boulder and a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Photojournalism. Bear is also the Visuals Editor at High Country News magazine – a non-profit journalism publication known for its thoughtful and nuanced coverage of the western United States. Originally from San Antonio, Texas, he currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.
FILMMAKER Cáit NíSíomón is an award-winning producer and journalist. With more than fifteen years of experience in documentary production and experimental multimedia practices, she brings together investigative journalism, ethnographic research, and storytelling to document the intersections of culture, environment, and collective memory. Her work emphasizes storytelling and oral history as essential tools for preserving cultural knowledge, sustaining the historical record, and fostering environmental and social awareness. Through collaborative and research-driven practice, she seeks to amplify forms of community resilience in the face of social and ecological change.
