A Tucson legacy: Linda Ronstadt surprised by music hall renaming

All eyes were on the Tucson native and music legend, and she knew it.

“Sitting through the ceremony was a bit difficult,” she admitted in a phone interview a couple of days later. “Sometimes Parkinson’s takes your voice away, and when it happens I start to stutter. I wasn’t prepared to speak.”

She also confessed that she never would have imagined her hometown would honor her in that controversial space that she had railed against when it was built in the early 1970s.

The sprawling Tucson Convention Center and adjoining Music Hall and Leo Rich Theater was built on 80 acres of downtown that for more than 100 years was home to mostly Mexican-American, Pasqua Yaqui and Tohono O’odham residents. Their barrio was razed in the name of urban renewal in a move that was controversial back then and remains so for some residents to this day. 

Ronstadt had spoken out against the Tucson Community Center — the Tucson Convention Center name came later — which makes the move to slap her name on the building a bit ironic, she said.

“I have been very vocal about complaining about the Convention Center,” she said. “It’s a community center replacing a community that was viable.”

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero says the long-simmering hurt over the TCC played a bit of a role in her proposal to honor Ronstadt, the first Latina woman to have a city building named after her.

“Her name belongs in that space and the names of Mexican-American people belong in a space that really (sparked) trauma that is still very much alive in many families, including Mexican and O’odham and Yaqui families that were displaced from that area to build the Tucson Convention Center,” Romero said. “It really is, for me, about reclaiming space.”

“She has a beautiful, long legacy in music. She doesn’t really need Tucson for her name to live on forever,” the mayor added. “What it does is give Tucson an opportunity to really recognize her as a daughter of Tucson. Her and her family have a long history here in our city and so being able to reconnect her to her history and her culture it really cements her legacy in the Southwest, in our Sonoran Desert …. Her culture and her Mexican-American culture, I think that renaming the Music Hall after her is my way of saying that there is history here in our city and our downtown that revives that Mexican-American family and people (who) were part of this space.”

Ronstadt said the funny thing about having her name on the Music Hall is that her Mexican-American heritage will be lost on people who have no idea about her beyond her historic music career that crossed genres — country, pop, rock and Mexican — and generations — her career spanned four decades, from the late 1960s through early 2000s.

“I have a German surname,” she said, then chuckled. “It’s always confusing to people. Of course a lot of Germans settled in northern Mexico and they married Mexican women. My great-grandfather married Margarita Redondo. His family had been (in Mexico) for at least 100 years.”

Ronstadt stopped singing around 2006 when she started experiencing symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. She was diagnosed with the degenerative disorder in 2013.

She has made several public appearances in Tucson since, including a couple “conversations with” evenings at Fox Tucson Theatre in 2014 and 2018 that gave fans an opportunity to hear Ronstadt tell stories about her career and her childhood in Tucson. 

She also made a journey in spring 2019 to Banámichi, Sonora, the small town along the Río Sonora several hours south of the U.S.-Mexico border not far from where her grandfather, Federico José María Ronstadt, was born. He immigrated to Tucson in the early 1880s.

Ronstadt took the journey with her longtime friends Bill Steen, who also has ties to that area, and Jackson Browne, and students from the Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy. Documentary filmmaker James Keach chronicled the visit in the 2020 film “Linda and the Mockingbirds.”

It was the second documentary centered around Ronstadt; in 2019, filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman released “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” based on her 2013 book “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir.”

In October, Ronstadt is releasing “Feels Like Home,” a book she wrote with Lawrence Downes with photos by Steen. The book is a love letter to Tucson and Mexico told through the family letters, photos, recipes and songs of six generations of Ronstadts.

At the May 7 renaming ceremony, which took place during the 40th annual Tucson International Mariachi Conference, the 75-year-old said she accepted the honor on behalf of the entire Ronstadt family, past and present.

“I came from a certain musical milieu that was informed a lot by the radio and a lot by the culture of Tucson,” she said. “My family was musical; some of them were professional, some weren’t professional at all, but everybody played and sang and they sang their own feelings and they sang their own sorrows and they sang their own joys. That’s why I accepted it on behalf of the entire Ronstadt family. We weren’t the only musical family but we were one of the musical families. My grandfather had a band, military band, at the end of the 19th century. They toured and got out on the road to California and played. But they were the main source of music in Tucson. If you had a wedding or baptism or military parade, my grandfather played music for you.”

When you ask her about her own legacy in Tucson, Ronstadt said she has no idea how she will be remembered.

“You don’t know what people are going to think of you after you’re gone,” she said. “And I don’t care; I’ll be dead.”

But she said that one of her proudest accomplishments was her Mexican records including the seminal 1987 album “Canciones de Mi Padre.” The album, which sold 2.5 million copies and earned Ronstadt a Grammy, played a significant role in mariachi’s rise on the world stage and the prominence of the Tucson International Mariachi Conference.

“I recorded Mexican music for the most self-indulgent reasons: I loved it and I wanted to sing it,” she said. “And I didn’t know that it was going to have any effect at all on the world of mariachi at large. They were idols to me, these kings and queens … they were my heroes. So to think that I had an impact on their world is a little overwhelming.”

In April, “Canciones de Mi Padre” was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry.