Barrio Viejo de Tucson, Colores

NOTE: For a little chicano visual history from the 1940s through the 1950s (zoot suits!), and some movin’ music, check out this Lalo Guerrero YouTube video. Or maybe this video of Lalo singing “Tacos for Two” at the age of 82, some seven years before his death in 2005.

 

A really nice photo walk area of Tucson is the Barrio Viejo area just south of the downtown Convention Center. Some have called this the oldest continually inhabited neighborhood in the Americas–if you discount Native American settlements such as Oraibi, that is. So, from a Euro-centric viewpoint, this might be true.

In recent years it has turned in to a very fashionable place to live and many of the old, crumbling, 19th and early 20th century adobe buildings have been completely restored and refurbished. On this particular day, I noticed a few of these now very modern homes for sale (expect to pay a premium!) as well as a handful of original adobe structures still waiting for buyers with the money, time, energy, and vision to fix them up.

I remember visiting the Barrio Viejo back in the mid-80s with an artist friend. Back then, the run down neighborhood was still sort of a marginal, perhaps even dangerous, place to live–at least from the perspective of the majority of whites living “north of the tracks” in Tucson. The folks we visited, though–artists as well–loved it there and had restored their old adobe structure beautifully. They found this multi-ethnic area of Tucson to be a rewarding place to put down roots.

Is this yet another gentrification story in the making? Perhaps. Although there is still quite a generous mix of the old and the new to be seen as you walk the streets of the area.

Here are a few color images from my photo stroll last Friday morning early (yet another “photo essay”), as the sun rose in a perfect blue Arizona sky, casting long shadows against the many-hued adobe walls…

 

This would have been the happenin’ place one hundred years ago!

 

Ripe for restoration:

 

An elegant door portrait from the Barrio Viejo:

 

Renovations often try to retain as much of the old flavor as might be possible. In this case, root beer flavor:

 

Red wall and shadows:

 

The sign refers to a local immigration situation in which Rosa Robles Loreto, mother of two young children, has taken refuge in a church for the past six months to avoid deportation and, thus, separation from her family:

 

Neat and trim:

 

Maybe someone left in a hurry? Note the chicken wire. This is one of the first layers of preparation prior to reapplying new stucco on the exterior wall:

 

Absence of color, in this case:

 

Making a statement:

 

The poem on the mural: “Esta es mi vida. Esta es mi amor. Que pasa mi vida tranquilo. Sin tristesa y sin dolor.” (A bit TexMex-ish…One spelling and one grammar error in these opening lines.) This wonderful work was done, with much love, in 1990 by Francisco:

 

Here, they have kept the old advert paint mostly intact, despite a renovation of the stucco:

 

Just outside the Barrio Viejo, a perspective on the Syrian refugee crisis: