Each issue we link up with Rachel Miller's Love Letters to Tucson blog for a letter from a Tucson inhabitant about why they love this fair city. This month: Aquil Joel Hameed of the new Axe Capoeira studio. Photos by Rachel Miller.
"I ended up in Tucson because of a girl. I moved for love, but not the love of Tucson. I hated Tucson. I hated Tucson because it wasn’t Phoenix, where I had a decent job, friends, and the capoeira group I’d trained and played with for five years.
"Before I moved down here I would travel down to Tucson for a weekend to visit my girlfriend, but we weren’t exploring Tucson. We’d basically just go out to eat and relax. At the time, I hadn’t come to appreciate the weather, the fact that it’s cooler here, the proximity of Mt. Lemmon, or the friendliness of the people in Tucson
"When I first moved here I would get in my car and drive for hours. I would pick a direction and just drive around. Sometimes I would drive until I ran out of road and for a long time would get turned around and get lost. But the next day I’d do it again. At the time I didn’t have a job in my field. The economy was crashing and it made things very difficult. I took a chance quitting my job, where I had been employed for over four years, and moved to Tucson.
"It wasn’t until I was a little more established, finished college, and started working in my field (I am an information technology manager), that I began to fall for Tucson and see what Tucson had to offer. And then in a lot of amazing and inexplicable ways, things began to come together.
"I started falling in love with Tucson when I positioned myself to begin teaching capoeira and building a group here. Capoeira [a dance and martial art developed by African slaves that brought to Brazil] had been a large part of my life in Phoenix. I trained in our Scottsdale academy for five years as part of the international Grupo Axé Capoeira organization. When I came down to Tucson I left my friends and my social connections there behind, but I found that the capoeira culture is very rich here. People in Tucson really resonate with capoeira and the arts. While there are maybe three capoeira groups in the Phoenix area, there are five or six in Tucson, which has a fraction of the population of the metropolitan Phoenix area.
"Another thing I love about Tucson is that it seems that so many of the people here are grounded, positive, and friendly as a whole. When I started teaching capoeira in town, I’d be at the mall, in the grocery store, or even in restaurants, and people would stop me and say, ‘You’re the capoeira guy!’ I think I got a lot of exposure early on where I first started loosely teaching classes at a local LA Fitness. And later they’d seen our group performing at Club Crawl or Tucson Meet Yourself, but people here are friendly enough to say hi and express their appreciation for the art form I’ve come to love. I didn’t experience that in quite this way until Tucson.
"This is a love letter to Tucson, but in a lot of ways, Tucson has taught me more about giving love to others, but even more importantly about receiving love and encouragement from the good people that come into my life. And it just so happens that Tucson has a lot of love to give.
"As for the girlfriend. she moved back to Phoenix. But I love Tucson and I love the life I have here, with my son, the capoeira academy, and my work."
Rachel met Aquil at the Axé Capoeira Tucson training space Studio Axé in midtown's Broadway Village where, under the beat of the berimbau, he almost convinced her to relive her childhood by attempting a handstand. This born-and-bred Phoenix boy has leaped the Gila River and now claims Tucson as the home he loves.
* Want to check out what Axé Capoeira Tucson is all about? They will be performing at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 15. Interested in learning Capoeria? Aquil and his instructors offer beginners and advanced classes as well as kids’ classes throughout the week. Axe Capoeira is at 2928 East Broadway Blvd. Tel: 520 990 1820.
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