Tucson Artists Bring Mexico Downtown

Posted by Andrea Berlin on May 02, 2008

As you walk down the alley between two dive bars to get a hot dog for a drunken snack, you might not expect to see an unfinished monument to the history of indigenous Mexican culture. But see it you will in the next few months, because this downtown magnum opus of murals is being completed as we speak.

Students, teachers, parents, local artists and even musicians like Tucson legend Salvador Duran trickle in to the space between the District Tavern and Sports on Congress, in Downtown Tucson, every day to dabble in some paint. Anyone is allowed to participate in the mural, but the formal specifications are Latinos and Chicanos, according to organizer David Aguirre.

“It’s an opportunity of a lifetime for Tucson to have all these master artists coming together,” said Cesi Garcia of the Raices Gallery.

Students in Christina Cardenes’s Mexican mural painting class at Pima Community College have also participated, adding images they have learned in the classroom setting. The mural is not a requirement for the class, but an optional activity to get more experience in the field.

The mural has also attracted attention from outside the Tucson area. From April 24 to April 26, the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture in Phoenix spent three days working on the mural. For some, it was a time to meet new friends, for others, to reminisce.

“I was able to reconnect with old friends and maestros,” Garcia said about some of the contributors such as Alfred Quiroz of the University of Arizona (who donated paint) and local artist Martin Moreno. “It’s a rock soup mural that started with nothing and ended up with a brilliant piece. It’s really exciting.”

The project began a little more than a month ago when Dinnerware Artspace owner David Aguirre put out a call to artists over the Internet. Starting out completely white, with a series of black spirals laying out sort of floor plan for the work, it quickly began to fill with various brightly-colored and imaginative images.

“It’s based on indigenous circles,” Garcia said. “They're references to old and contemporary time and changing, different issues affecting communities throughout us, whether it be immigration or cultural issues.”

Students and artists first began to fill in the spaces between the lines with indigenous dragon characters and a detailed Mayan pyramid. Now, as the artists have filled about three-quarters of the space, you can see everything from a human figure with numbers on his chest and glasses to a detailed prickly pear cactus, American flags, indigenous design work, angry deities, human sacrifices and more.

More than just interesting artwork, these images represent the issues that we all face in today's multi-cultural society.

“There are also the contemporary issues which all of us share: economic times, political upheaval in this country, an election here,” Garcia said. “All different kinds of issues that pertain to us as human beings in this culture and this hemisphere.

“To also have (the artists) dialogging: generations and generations and generations in Arizona. Others fairly recently arrived from Mexico and other countries farther south,” she said. “It’s living history to get all these artists together to paint on one project.”