<< BARRIO IN THE PRESS

The New York Times,
Sunday, January 21, 1996

Markers of Arizona History –
Tubac, a former presidio, is now an artists’ colony, while a nearby ruined mission church speaks eloquently of the colonial era

By Judith Anderson

In the Santa Cruz River Valley of southern Arizona, history worked its way north in the wake of European colonization, leaving two important markers at the foot of the Santa Rita Mountains: a mission at Tumacacori and a presidio at Tubac, the latter now reconstructed and surrounded by a thriving artists’ colony. In a day trip from Tucson a visitor can mix 300 years of the past with the crafts and designs of tomorrow, side by side there on the frontage road of Interstate 19.

The mission at Tumacacori (toom-a-KAH-kuh-ree), 45 miles south of Tucson, is just a ruin now. The 20-foot walls have stabilized, by the exterior plaster has fallen away in many places, exposing the tiers of mud adobes beneath. The roof fell in decades ago; the wind and rain blow freely through gaping door and window frames. The bell tower rises raggedly because it was never finished in the first place. But over the ravaged sanctuary walls floats a perfect small white dome, freshly washed with lime plaster and topped with a tiny wooden cross. Glimpsed from the Interstate, gleaming against the intense blue desert sky, it looks as if it belongs on Santorini.

This is one of a chain of outposts established by Spanish missionaries. The site was designated a national in 1908 and is now administered as a national historic park. Here the policy of the National Park Service has been to preserve but not restore. Visitors can explore the shadowy interior of the stabilized mission church and prowl through the crumbling remains of the convento, the compound containing the workshops and priests’ living quarters, as well as through the substantially intact round mortuary chapel and its surrounding campo santo, or holy field, imbued with that peculiar intimacy of all abandoned cemeteries. An adobe visitors’ center built in 1937 and a modest museum both house absorbing exhibits that explain the technology and arts of the era under the gaze of five of the original Mexican Baroque statues from the interior of the church.

The missions had three incarnations, each dedicated to a different patron saint. In 1691, Father Eusebio Kino, an Italian-born, German-educated Jesuit, arrived in Tumacacori and founded a mission. He named it for San Cayetano. By the end of the 17th century, the local Pima Indians, attracted by metal tools, new livestock, new crops – including fruit trees and wheat, which, unlike corn, could be grown in winter – were converting in substantial numbers.

For 50 years they were impressed for forced labor in mines and on ranches, and in 1751 they rebelled. It took the Spaniards four months to quell the uprising. To control the territory better, they began building a presidio three miles north, at Tubac, and moved the mission to the same side of the river. This second incarnation was dedicated to San Jose.

The mission’s third version came after Spain expelled the Jusuits from its New World holdings in 1767. They were replaced the next year by the gray-robed Franciscans, who immediately began to redecorate. At Tumacaqcori they walled in the mission and spent the 1770’s building adobe dwellings for the Pimas. In 1802 Fray Narciso Gutierrez and his Indian laborers began building a permanent church, this time called the Mision de la Purisima Concepcion de Tumacacori. These are the ruins that stand today. The church was originally patterned on San Xavier del Bac in Tucson, one of the finest examples of Spanish colonial architecture in the United States.

Even though plagued by money problems and never finished, the mission must have been a stunning landmark in the flat Santa Cruz valley 150 years ago. Its eroded double columns and pediment still retain a large degree of their dignity. The plaster exterior walls were embedded with crushed red brick and designs were painted on them. Inside were paintings of the Apostles, symbols of the Virgin Mary, carvings depicting the Stations of the Cross, elaborate Mexican wooden statues; visitors must depend on exhibits in the museum, however, to appreciate the black dado on white walls, the band of pendant half-circles near the ceiling, the floral stencils and painted curtains, the dark red plaster on the floor.

In 1828, in a gesture of independence, the Mexicans expelled the last Franciscan friar from Tumacacori. Without a priest, the mission began to deteriorate. When the presidio at Tubac was overwhelmed by Apaches in 1848, survivors helped the two dozen people remaining at Tumacacori to pack up the sacred relics, santos and vestments and transfer them to San Xavier de Bac for safekeeping. Tumacacori was abandoned.

And it is uninhabited still. Yet on any quiet day it is possible to imagine – almost impossible not to – those Pimas and their friars in their peaceful daily rounds of cultivation and meditation. You can work out the positions of the grist mill, the granary, leather workers’ shops, pottery kilns and the monjeria, the place where young women learned crafts (and the site of the only indoor toilet apart from the one in the priests’ quarters). Wandering through the sun-drenched remains of the walled garden east of the convento, touching the bark of gnarled fruit trees, it is easy to imagine the abundance of pomegranates, figs, quinces and peaches from the friars’ five-acre orchard. It is a simple place, yet it is one of those unexpectedly evocative spots that project us for a moment into the past and leave us with some respect for hardship and faith.

A trip to Tumacacori almost always leads to Tubac as well, where history can be leavened with gallery-hopping and shopping. Energetic visitors can get there on foot: connecting Tumacacori National Historic Park is the Juan Bautista de Anza national Historic Trail, which marks the route of the expedition that eventually established the first European colony in San Francisco. From the Tumacacori trail head on the south side of the picnic grounds, to the Tubac trail head near the presidio gate, the distance is four and a half miles. It is not a strenuous outing, but the trail crosses the Santa Cruz River several times and can be dangerous when the water is high.

Anybody worried about wet feet or snakes can drive the three miles north to Tubac, and stop on the way at a little Mexican place called Wisdom’s Café, easily recognized by the two 10-foot white chickens in the front yard (When the Wisdom family opened the restaurant in 1944, it was called Chicken Taco and the portly pullets were on the roof). The décor is very basic – sports trophies, antique typewriters and notes from happy customers – and so is the menu (no credit cards, and salsa costs extra). But some green corn tamales and one of their “world famous fruit burros” – apple, blueberry, cherry or peach – are enough to fortify anybody for an afternoon in Tubac.

Tubac is a town with energy, though that may not be apparent at first glance. Seven or eight dusty streets are studded with low-slung buildings, and some are still the original unplastered adobe of the 1860’s. Later editions, built over the Spanish colonial foundations, kept the same tone, largely because they were constructed of the same materials, recycled from a ruin next door. Today more than 1,000 residents of the town and surrounding ranches make sure Tubac keeps it old adobe character intact.

Originally a small Pima farm that supplied the mission, Tubac became, in 1752, the first European settlement in what is now Arizona, when 50 calvarymen garrisoned the Presidio de San Ignacio de Tubac. The restored presidio in turn anchored Arizona’s first state park, dedicated in 1959. A museum displays an array of spurs and spoons and other domestic artifacts that emphasize the homely details of everyday life at a military outpost. Part of it is a glassed-in underground archeological exhibit.

A free brochure offers a history of the presidio and a 25-cent map lays out a self-guided tour that includes the Old Tubac schoolhouse, St. Ann’s Church and a dozen historic houses, as well as a visitors’ center and a picnic area. Every Sunday afternoon from 1 to 4, October through March, a volunteer group called Los Tubaquenos recreates 17th-century daily life in the plaza.

Tubac was an unpredictable and frequently hellish place to live, what with water problems and political turmoil and relentlessly marauding Apaches. Eight times the citizens decamped. When Tubac became part of the United States through the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, it was a ruin. Five years later it was a boom town, as prospectors and investors responded to reports of gold and silver mines in the Santa Ritas.

But its heyday was brief. When the Civil War began, the troops headed east (most to support the Confederacy), the Apaches descended, and the residents fled. Later, when the Indians had been finally subdued, resettlement was discouraged by legal disputes over Spanish land grants that were not resolved until well into the 20th century.

Tubac was a town in limbo for nearly a hundred years.

In 1948 the painter Dale Nichols chose the village as the site for an art school. The school survived for only a year, but it attracted other artists to the village. The colony flourished, and in 1958 Will Rogers Jr. and his wife, Collier, bought the school building, the old Garrett House, and remodeled it. Other Hollywood personalities modernized adobe buildings as well, or bought ranches nearby, introducing an era of expansion. In the 1960’s the golf club and the Tubac Inn were built, the annual Tubac Festival of the Arts and the state park attracted tourist, and the Santa Cruz Valley Art Association built the Tubac Center for the Arts. Somewhere along the way the town invented its motto: Where art and history meet.

And that’s pretty much the spirit of the place now. It’s still a one-story town. There are about a hundred businesses tucked into the mellow adobe buildings, and at least half offer arts of crafts of some sort: fine art, folk art, art jewelry, pottery, basketry, sculpture, carved wood, wrought iron, blown glass…and of course there’s kitsch. Make no mistake, there’s some bad art in Tubac. A few years ago, when the economy was so grim, it looked as if the kitsch might prevail. As more and more low-end items appeared to appeal to limited pocketbooks. But art is making a comeback, especially in the rejuvenated Old Tubac area east of Burruel Street, near the presidio.

There’s almost always something amusing to be found in the courtyard between Dos Perros and Los Portales, at 8 Burruel. The art in Los Portales tends to be established if not serious (it’s set off by an expansive, quirky selection of furniture, tableware, linens and gifts), while the pieces at Dos Perros, one of the newest shops in Tubac, seem to have been selected to make you grin. Sophisticated works by artists with national following, including Andrew Rush and Fox McGrew, are displayed next to folk are from Mexico and sage angels or gathering post by local artisans. Rene Siqueiros grandson of the celebrated Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, is making his own mane with primitive acrylics displayed here. It’s a light hearted space with a humane mark-up policy.

Down the hill past St. Ann’s Church – worth a visit for its dignity and simplicity and the charming figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe mounted over the doors – La Paloma de Tubac displays a collection of 10,000 items of Latin American folk art. The proprietors have been dealing with the same families of folk artists in Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico for years, and snapshots of several generation peer through the counter glass by the cash register. At the other end of the spectrum, and of the village, AuSi Gallery (its name taken from the symbols for gold and silica), at 38 Camino Otero, specializes in art glass. In between, at 18 Plaza Road, Lee Blackwell displays his metalwork in a garden of copper fountains. Hal Empie can almost always be found at his easel creating western paintings at 242 Tubac Road, while Leroy Doyle and Curry Johnson work on modern abstracts in their studio at 12 Placita de Anza.

During the Tubac Festival of the Arts (the 37th annual event begins Feb. 3 and lasts nine days), the wild varity of art gets considerably wilder. About 100 stalls crowd the streets. Artisans are screened for entry, but the kitsch holds its own. Elegant hand-crafted armoires sit in the dust right next to the Navajo tacos and corn on the cob. It’s not high end or hard sell. This is Tubac, and it’s fun!