Just a quick follow-up…
This publication will remain free. I am here to share and to learn. I’m shooting for Sunday mornings.
It will be a mash-up of art, folklore and spiritual traditions, botanical heritage, and pages from history with ties to the present. You can click on any image to see an enlargement.
Part of Mexico until 1854, Spanish has been the dominant language in the borderlands. I try to honor that by integrating it into my writing as best as this old gavacha can. Don’t be shy about correcting me.
OK. Now that’s out of the way…
Tucson is lovingly called “The Old Pueblo” by locals - Tucsonenses. The image from my first post has an origin that deserves a mention. It began as a Lotería card box for Arte de la Vida’s famous Lotería de Tucson art exhibition. Local artists each drew Lotería cards from a hat, then created their own interpretations. This was done for several years, and the exhibitions were fabulous. In 2018, Daniel Buckley, one of Tucson’s media guru's, photographed each artist’s work of art. I then transposed each photo into a playing card to create the 54-card deck. It was a lovely adjunct to that year’s exhibit and sale.
Over time, aspects from this design became my own visual love-letter to my hometown. Let’s start with the master guardian spirit of the Tucson region, the one who was here first: I'itoi — graces the top of the “Man-In-The-Maze” design as the creator of the O'odham people. He gave them the gift of the Himdag, a way of living in balance with the natural world as a whole living being. He rises above A-Mountain, originally called, S-cuk Son, meaning "Black Hill".
Then I added Lalo Guerrero in the moon singing There’s No Tortillas, a favorite community sing-along. Mariachi music flows in our veins, and classes are available in many of our schools. Tucson is home to the famous International Mariachi Conference, where students from around the country and across the border get to practice with the maestros/masters. Linda Ronstadt will always be our hometown girl, and our Westside lowriders are an integral part of Tucson’s Mexican-American culture and identity. The shrine to El Tiradito is a sacred spot for all, and community groups hold vigils there year-round. And although some 60 miles south, The Wall affects the lives of everyone— directly and indirectly. Skeletons reaching out represent ancestors and the desconocidos (unknown) who have died in the desert, reminding us they are always with us. The backdrop map of La Pimería Alta is one drawn by Padre Eusébio Kino, shown here as a silhouette on his horse. More on him and La Pimería Alta later.
La Virgen de Guadalupe/Tonanztín (Nuahatl) is everywhere. She is Holy Queen, Empress of the Americas. She is embraced as Our Lady, and holds up our community. I heard it said once that she holds the blueprint for the Southwest Region.
There’s a tiny flat ribbon that running across it all— the Santa Cruz— the river that made human settlement possible here thousands of years ago.
The embellishment in the painting exists over a doorway at the beloved Mission San Xavier del Bac. Famously known as “The White Dove of the Desert”, it was built in the late 1700s and is located on the Tohono O’dham reservation. The Nation is its steward. It also remains an active parish in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson.
Downtown Tucson has undergone a renaissance of sorts in recent decades, and the old Fox Theater has been restored to its status as the treasured landmark it was in the 1930s.
The wondrous, natural backdrop of all this is, of course, the Sonoran Desert. The Saguaro cactus grows nowhere else on earth but here. Hundreds of years old, they stand as the mystical sentinels of La Pimería Alta. Known for being giant “hotels” for an array of desert creatures, I chose the wee Elf Owl - the smallest in the world, peeking out of his “apartment”. The Lesser long-nose bat is one of the saguaro’s primary pollinators, and just one of many species of bats that help control our insect population and keep the desert ecology in balance.
As a final note, Arte de la Vida recently passed the Lotería de Tucson torch to Tucson’s oldest Chicano art gallery, Raices Taller (Roots Workshop). It will be exciting to see what they do in the years to come.
So there you have an interpretation of my introductory art piece. It has become my favorite default because it depicts things that mean a lot to me and fill our corner of the Universe.
¡Adelante! Onward!
Your breadth of knowledge and skill at writing are delightful! Thanks.