Linda Ronstadt's Borderland - NYTimes.com We are driving outside Naco, Ariz., near the Mexico border, on a two-lane blacktop under a half-moon and stars. The distant mountains are lost in shadow, and there's not much to look at beyond the headlight beams and the rolling highway stripes. In the middle seat of the minivan, Linda Ronstadt is talking about her childhood. "We used to sing, "Don't go in the cage tonight, Mother darling, for the lions are ferocious and may bite. And when they get their angry fits, they will tear you all to bits, so don't go in the lion's cage tonight! We had really good harmonies worked out for that. "We" is her sister, Suzy, and her brother Peter, who used to terrify her when she had to go to the woodpile at night. "My brother would load me up as much as he could then he'd tell me, "There's a ghost!" and then he'd run and then - Aaaaaah!! - there'd be kindling spread all over the ground." The ghost stories - and howling coyotes and pitch-black landscape that surrounded her family's home - left an impression. I am really scared of the dark. Actually, as we drive through the night in the Sonoran Desert, what she really seems to be is delighted. She can't stop laughing. When Linda thinks of home - meaning where your soul inhabits the soil, wherever else your body might be - it's not Southern California, the place forever associated with her professional life, as Queen of Rock in the land of Byrds and Stone Poneys and Eagles. Nor is it San Francisco, where she lives now. Her home lies in dryer, poorer country. It's in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, in Tucson and points south, where giant saguaros, slender and humanoid, signal touchdowns all over the hills and beside the highways. It's where the mountains are jagged islands in a blue ocean of sky, where the rock-and-thorn terrain is hostile to people but friendly to cottonwoods, organ-pipe cactus, green-skinned palo verde trees and mesquite. It's fertile range for cattle and horses, and well cultivated in alfalfa, peanuts and agave. It's the cowboy-and-Indian West. It's a deep vein of Mexican-America, a rich stretch of bicultural borderland from Nogales to Agua Prieta. It was where Ópata, Yaqui, Pima and Apache Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Basques and Jesuit missionaries converged and collided in the 17th and 18th centuries. It's where Linda's great-grandfather Frederick, an immigrant from Hanover, Germany, settled in the 1850s, becoming a mining engineer and a colonel in the Mexican Army. His son Federico, Linda's grandfather, was born on a Sonoran hacienda and brought his family to Tucson in 1882. Tucson is where Linda was born, in 1946, second daughter to Gilbert and Ruth Mary Ronstadt, sister to Peter, Suzy and Mike. You may not have thought of Linda as a Mexican-American singer, but if you've heard her, you've heard her deep Sonoran roots. Hearing the ranchera singer Lola Beltrán for the first time can bring the shock of recognition to a Linda fan; there's influence and long tradition behind that lustrous voice. Those old Mexican songs in Linda's hit 1987 record "Canciones de Mi Padre" were ones she learned before she was 10. Linda, who is 67, published a memoir this fall, "Simple Dreams," which touches only briefly on her Arizona girlhood before moving on to her recording career. I knew about Linda the rock "n" roll sex bomb, who just made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I'd gotten to know her through her work in Arizona for civil rights and immigration changes. But after reading her book, I wanted to know more about little Linda the pony wrangler and devotee of Hopalong Cassidy, and the place she grew up in the 1940s and "50s. I emailed her this summer and asked if she was up for a memory trip. She was - she still has a house in Tucson, and many relatives and friends to see. (Other families have family trees, she told me. We have a family anthill. Tucson is just swarming with Ronstadts.") And she was eager to go back down into Sonora, a journey she'd made only a handful of times. We hatched a plan: We'd meet in November, when it's cooler, see points of Ronstadt interest in Tucson, cross into Mexico at Naco, then head down the Rio Sonora valley to grandfather Federico's hometown, Banámichi. She wanted to bring some old friends along as guides: Bill and Athena Steen and their son Kalin, who live in Canelo; and Dennis and Debbie Moroney, who raise cattle in Cochise County, near the border. Linda and Bill would meet me in Tucson, and we'd pick up the others on the way, for a truck-and-minivan caravan down memory lane. Lawrence Downes is an editorial writer for The Times.