Earth is the rawest of raw materials.
—LUCY LIPPARD
2015 | I followed Sandy to the crumbling adobe shrine outside the El Minuto Café. The sun had set west beyond the railroad tracks and Interstate 10 yet El Tiradito was lit up by a chorus of flickering votives. A place for wayward Catholic pagans like me. And Sandy, a self-avowed atheist.
Tucson writer and friend Maya L. Kapoor says all of El Tiradito’s stories “tend toward the lurid: gunfights, broken hearts, high speed tragedies. El Tiradito is a memorial; none of these stories have happy endings.”4
Sandy took the paper folded in fourths and stuck it into the centuries-old adobe wall, alongside other petitions with their browned and frayed edges existing within the façade’s well-worn grooves. This gesture gave me hope for continued connection, wondering how we would bridge our differences. It also made me question her atheism. Did she know what altars are for? Even if El Tiradito made a show of serving the hopeless, I wondered if Sandy could one day see me as being something beyond an undercover lover with holes in her sweater. How we could sustain ourselves, crumbling façade and all.
I knew I wasn’t ready to be seen.
El Tiradito was right around the corner from her house in Barrio Viejo. She didn’t live alone, but like anybody else in her predicament, she was very lonely. Sandy wasn’t married but wore a Jewish grandmother’s wedding ring on her left ring finger. It suited her Jupiter in Virgo to get married for practicality’s sake. This wasn’t a detraction per se but a mere complicated fact. Such details I have become versed in through my own creative pursuits—no judgment, just unreliable facts in learning the lores of other brown artistic types shaped by taboo, privilege, and unmoored libido. I was recently unmoored and struggling to find my footing against the tide—I was back, boomerang-style, living in the little house in front of my parents’ house back in Huntington Park, a southeast Los Angeles neighborhood that went from white to brown in the mideighties. It was an old manufacturing Reagan Democrat bedroom community that gave way to immigrants fleeing the cold wars in their countries. I still licked at the wounds from having been laid off from my fancy arts institution job all while breaking up with my Bay Area girlfriend. I had the dream and then lost the dream just as Sandy came into the picture to moor my desires. The old picture tore itself up.
What was I getting myself into here? Were these just basic desires to comprehend, to finally grow into? Grow out of? Or was I destined to enact my own chaos that comes with the territory of being an artist?
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2017 | Someone I knew posted a real estate listing of a house I was intimately familiar with, if only briefly. It was crass to see the amount the house was going for on Facebook. Is this what we do now? Peruse other peoples’ selling power? Consider buying a rehabbed 1927 adobe home in one of the more expensive neighborhoods in Tucson’s historic downtown barrios?
It was Sandy’s house and two years after my first visit there. I started fantasizing about making the exorbitant purchase myself, melancholic in the Freudian sense, as a way to continue living with these ghosts. They needed more space. What could be better than an early twentieth century adobe?
I read the description in its realtor parlance and followed up with my own narration of each room. The bedroom with the hot pink accent wall. Its saturation come to life in my first weekend there.
I kept reading and I kept yearning. I reached the “truth wall.”
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The truth wall lives as a part of the room that exposes how the house is built. You see the unique materials that went into the skeleton—or how we know if the house has good bones. The truth wall reveals what we are surrounded by, showing its history in the sedimentary layers of adobe, bricks that live in the triangular crevice, deep in recess, high up where the wall touches the ceiling. An opening in a wall surface, the organic components within a wall, a century and its violences trapped behind spackle and stucco.
A truth wall might help increase the property’s value. In the era where our desires for sustainable, climate-conscious living come inside a gold-level package of mercenary marriages—we marry up even when we want to slum—a truth wall or truth window often serves as a decor option demonstrative of our own interiors.
The truth wall silently nodded to the breakup that put it on the market.
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Have you ever made adobe? Or wondered about the adoberos who made the large earth-sourced bricks that sit like ancient sacks of sugar on top of each other? Making adobe bricks is a process that requires repetitive motion of fingers, hands, wrists, arms, elbows, and shoulders as you’re bent at both waist and knee. People have been making adobe since the tenth century. An ancient how-to manual by the early Sonoran Desert dwellers, the Hohokam, who the Tohono O’odham and Pima tribes descend from, and early constructors of adobe shelters might instruct you to dig a shallow trench in the ground using a well-pointed digging stick and to pile all excavated material inside of the trench. Then fill that trench with a three-to-one mix of mud and broken stone, or river pebbles, tamping thoroughly to fill all of the nooks and crannies. Dampen the mix only as necessary, using only enough water to soften the mud to a stiff moldable consistency. A penalty is incurred for anyone using more than the minimum amount of water required.
After the foundation has been allowed to set from one full moon to the next, place forms—three feet high, in six-foot lengths—around the perimeter of your chosen structure, inside and out, held almost two feet apart, weave twigs into a scaffold of mesquite poles in front of the slowly forming shelter, plaster with mud and allow it all to dry thoroughly for another full moon. Fill forms with mud that has been moistened only sufficiently to form a pliable mass, as used with the foundation, puddling thoroughly but using water sparingly. Tamp with bare hands until form has been solidly filled. For an example of ancient adobe handiwork, see the Casa Grande National Ruins in Southern Arizona, constructed by the prehistoric Salado tribe.
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Everything that made this mud—the water, the soil, the straw, occasional blood—must be strong enough to hold a house together.
You need a lot to make a stable foundation, to build walls capable of holding difficult truths.
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The truth is often too much to traffic in, so it makes sense to put it behind a wall. You make a crack, clean the edges, and place a piece of clear glass in front so you know that it’s there. You turn the truth into an object and say it’s in the room with you, even when you come up with daily modes of obfuscation. Versatile is a truth able to keep you cool in the summer heat and warm every winter.
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It had been two years since the last time I saw these adobe bricks in triangular formation, tucked under the slant of the roof of your house. An early twentieth century adobe home, a transformed Sonoran remixed in place on a one-way street in Barrio Viejo. It was Halloween the weekend we spent together, but we didn’t dress up. I passed out candy while you graded papers. You became agitated when I asked why you and she never did a couples’ costume. I said you two would have been a perfect Trotsky and Kahlo. You gulped down your Manhattan just after setting a pair of martini glasses in front of me. “Let’s go inside,” you said, changing the subject, your tone coming up for air sweetened by the whiskey.
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2017 | I had spent the hottest part of the Arizona summer in Patagonia near Nogales. The border scorches—even above a set of mountain ranges that means the air is ten to twelve degrees cooler. It means a high of 96 degrees instead of the 108 back in Tucson. It means I can return some oxygen back to my coastal California-raised brain and body. I was not unaccustomed to hibernating in the middle of June.
I was in a unique place, one of the most diverse in all of the United States, for Patagonia is distinguished by six ecosystems encountering one another—the Sonoran Desert meeting the bottoms of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre butting up against the Chihuahuan Desert leaning into the Neotropics flirting with the high desert’s grassy wonderlands.
I had booked it out of Tucson to beat the heat and avoid heartbreak’s niggling little ghosts. Restoring habitats using sustainable ecological methods was a good place to start. Methods that required younger, stronger bodies to put their hands into the soil. The environmental study that hooked me into gifting my labor.
That meant having to muster whatever elbow grease still existed inside of me, parsing it out from the usual reserves of lactic acid that typically resided in the vessels between muscle and bone. Getting up early meant shooting cold brew down my throat and chomping on organic, sugar-free beef jerky to ensure some protein could prop up my body with nutrients that would undoubtedly sweat themselves out. I trimmed mesquite trees growing on a steep incline, dug up irrigation systems overlooking red eroded buttes, and weeded amaranth out of squash crops while bent at the knee. Man, this is the food of my ancestors, I thought bitterly, pulling at the greens.
By the end of day one my body ached, my spirit burned. I had to do my part to forget my heartache by breaking my body open.
This was essentially an internship at forty, and the skeptical Jiminy Cricket lumpen proletariat in me restlessly ruminated about the unequal division of labor between the owners and the contracted labor there to tend to their land. I am just one generation out from a broken Mexican economy that we left to come north, seeking better opportunities. Well, not we, but he—my dad. He settled in Los Angeles in the early seventies after following various commodities—potatoes in Wisconsin, plastics in Texas, strawberries in California. He, embittered by the time I came along. I grew up weary of his moods as well as any exploitation of my labor. Protecting myself against both, a daily task.
But I wanted this, so the apprentice I became. It was an art I wanted to learn. I wasn’t selling my labor—I was learning a skill.
I wanted to do my part in creating a relational map—to make, see, and share the worlds we could actually belong to if we could sustain the intimacy. Talk and then listen; dig up the remnants of the earth we shared to then pat it back down tighter. Walk the wounded back to themselves and encounter a little bit of healing for myself along the way. That was the hardest part—to see and accept what might be readily offered to me without my anger or suspicion obstructing something so needful. I wanted to be and stay in the room with the pain of others and trigger the wherewithal to mark my own way back through the underworld of myself.
But something changed on that third day of borderlands restoration. My curiosity piqued when we were asked to make adobe bricks.
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I arrived at the Deep Dirt Farm to a crowd of volunteers around Kate Tirion, the proprietor, who was giving everyone instructions on how to clean an outdoor compost toilet. Tirion was a spry and strong seventy-something who, after a cancer scare in her sixties, pivoted into the healing properties of permaculture. It made me recall my own cancer scare back when I was living in the Bay Area. For two weeks, I didn’t know if the enlarged lymph nodes under my arms had bad cysts or the plain, not-bad kind. For two weeks, I wondered how I let my life lose its color, its volume, all while possibly incubating cancer near my breasts. Tirion chirped me out of my reverie and into her strong Welsh accent. How fortuitous it was that we had arrived to learn such an important cornerstone of sustainability culture as she vigorously (and audibly) churned the bowl with her composting rake. The gut-rocking stench coming out of that outhouse made me question such fortuity.
I was happy to move away from the outhouse, especially because painful fibroids were in the midst of turning my uterus inside out—bio-matter surely connected to my irregular cystic lymph nodes. I would have to come inside this compost toilet to deal with golf-ball-sized blood clots shooting out of me every couple of hours, though I did manage to comfort myself with four ibuprofens and the thought of blood being put back into the earth. It had a very Anzaldúan quality—helping the border’s wound heal with the runoff of my body’s internal properties. It was a way I could refuse to let my body’s messy condition take its emotional toll.
There were other messes to be made. We moved toward the mud pit where we would be sourcing materials to make three hundred adobe bricks that morning. None of us would be going home with clean clothes; I knew that from the previous two workdays with the restoration crew. I braced myself to soon be covered in mud, straw, and whatever species called those things home.
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2015 | Is this Frida blue? I asked, gesturing to the walls of her house as we made our way to the front door. The entrance of her front patio was trellised with Mexican birds of paradise, like we were suddenly transported to Coyoácan. I looked both ways to make sure Diego wasn’t around.
I walked into the foyer and saw Mujer Angel, the famous photograph of a woman with her back to the camera walking toward the Sonoran Desert with a boombox. Sandy was writing about Graciela Iturbide’s photographic oeuvre as it pertains to border ontology. The photograph stunned me, shielding my silence from any scrutiny. I looked around the entrance hall and saw the truth wall behind a huge painting of a sacred heart—the classic, bulging red aortic rendering, not unlike what you might see in Mexican lotería cards, against a sunburst yellow background. Above it hung a garland of red chili pepper lights. The strange wall dividing the rooms felt anachronistic, with its salient texture a muddy glow against the shiny, gunmetal-gray concrete floors, and the earth-toned living room furnished in Copenhagen Imports behind it.
I didn’t want to know its story just yet. Of how brown art lived there, possibly even thrived. Near the adobe, on the adobe, beside the adobe. The spoils of hard work by the artists that lit up the foyer is not an art for art’s sake. Yet the bricks that laid atop one another sealed a different history within a house that was built in the old barrio in 1927.
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1927 was an important year for Tucson’s architectural progress, that progress second only to Charles Lindy Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” skating down Tucson’s Davis-Monthan Air Force dirt-ground tarmac in a cloud of dust, finally stopping for him to exit the small airplane. The pilot would later be known for the violent death of his kidnapped child and his isolationist position in leading the America First Committee, an organization against joining the allies to help Great Britain in World War II. A would-be Nazi sympathizer, Lindy was guided to a Sonoran Desert succulent sculpture, “Spirit,” made of the region’s renowned ocotillo and other cactuses (designed and fabricated by local florist Hal Burns), where he posed with and greeted officials. His visit to the southwestern city four months after his historic trans-Atlantic flight was part of a 22,000-mile, forty-eight-state tour sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation to promote air commerce. It was a hot day that autumn afternoon, and Tucson was a city on the precipice of growth.
By the late thirties, Tucson was poised to meet the twentieth century once and for all. According to Tucson historian Lydia R. Otero, the city’s public square, known locally as la calle, had landed in the crosshairs of zoning officials interested in making Tucson not just a bigger city but a better one. The emergence of the 1966 Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project, the state’s first major urban renewal project, included “plans to build several government buildings, a modern retail complex, and as its showpiece, a new performance arena and community conference facility, the Tucson Community Center,” known today as the Convention Center. As a result, Barrio Viejo arrived as a seventies-era post-development neighborhood simulacra following the renewal initiative in which a long stretch of adobe homes and storefronts was contoured from the remnants of three early twentieth-century Tucson neighborhoods—Barrio Libre, Barrio El Hoyo, and Barrio Membrillo—creating a residential myth that appreciates in value. Or, as Otero suggests, Barrio Viejo came to be through a “destruction of a large Mexican American community through urban renewal in the late sixties fueled by the idealization of modernity, a local economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the evolution of federal housing policies.”
Tucson’s urban core found itself typified into more territorial-period adobe buildings than were found in any other part of Tucson, and its intact Mexican-style urban streetscapes were unique in an Arizona always striving toward leaner and cheaper housing booms. These urban neighborhoods reflected the spatial vernacular of the Sonoran, transformed Sonoran, and transitional architectural styles that, over time and the mountains that stood in Manifest Destiny’s way, came southwest with eastern tastes and imaginaries. While some carriers of those tastes came west to escape such conventions, others brought them along with the intention of civilizing the old pueblo, one barrio at a time, once and for all.
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We arrived back at Barrio Viejo. Sandy beamed at me, lying on her couch, drinking her wine, and reading the poetry books I’d found in corners of her living room. I was maybe too comfortable. We were on that cosmic planar velocity, our compatibility revealing itself to us at breakneck speed. We finally settled into her couch and watched a movie. She shifted so much she jostled me out of my little spoon spot in the concave of her body. I felt her body heat up, a quickened pulse practically thumping into my spine.
Are you feeling anxious?
Before she could answer the inevitable, I felt something gushing out of me. I rushed into the bathroom next to the truth wall. It was the first time I knew something was not right with my body.
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2017 | Who wants to stomp in the pit? Tirion called out to the crowd of mostly local high school students awkwardly shifting back and forth at the task she had laid before them. I was grateful for these young people emanating the skepticism I was hoping to obscure. Stomping would help soften the soil, water, and straw for easier brick molding, but I wondered if I could push myself through these new thresholds. I was surprised by the collaborators who went for it. They walked past me, unaware of the numerous ways the thought of sullying myself paralyzed me. Being in their presence took me back to my own internship days, as the only brown kid in a hallway of predominantly European art and conservation professionals, up on the hill where the Getty Center was, back in Brentwood, California. The young people here, though, were local to the area—the children of ranchers who rolled up each morning in late-model, big-wheeled American trucks alongside the children whose parents worked on their ranches.
Five of the young high-school-aged women offered to get into the pit with Tirion’s friend Michael, a local chef and connoisseur of seeds, which he kept offering to people as a seed mix, a multitude of tiny colors inside a clear sandwich baggie. Michael was breaking down soil from the embankment, half circling the mud pit with a large shovel; the mud reached him at mid-calf.
I was overwhelmed by the severity of contact with the wet earth. It was the rawest sensorium I had encountered, and I longed to surrender to it. I thought of the mess outside meeting the mess inside my body and retreated.
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2015 | I was giving myself away. I had never bled so much on the first day. Provisions could not contain me. My body started feeling unfamiliar to me. Was this aging? Or was my body trying to stake a claim on a lover who’d never fully be mine?
I left a trail of bloody tears from the bedroom all the way to the bright white subway-tiled floor in the large bathroom. This is so much blood. We had to change the sheets twice in less than thirty-six hours. I even soaked through the mattress. I wondered how she might explain that after I had gone.
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2017 | The next assignment required the wheelbarrows. And Kate Tirion wanted to know who was going to help fill them and carry the muddy booty back and forth between the pit and the molding area. I longed for a role of such important utility, so I volunteered, hoping some activity would calm the painful itching from an attack of fire ants, their anthills so common in the desert.
Plunging my hands into the mud pit felt like dropping a cannonball into the deepest part of a swimming pool. It was exhilarating. Had I found the amniotic sac I had been desperate to return to, hoping to be spat back out into the right side of history? I felt my hand in the softest part of the earth. I didn’t want to let go.
The softest parts are often the heaviest. I had to recall my core muscles to get that mud into the wheelbarrow and then not drop it all over the ground. I took my first batch to where the brickmakers waited and watched them with hands alone scoop their batches into the molds, their backs bent, sleeves rolled up as they fashioned big birthday-cake-sized mud bricks with careful precision.
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After Patagonia I was off to Marfa, Texas. I had been invited to read at the community’s inaugural poetry festival and was glad to be venturing into the West Texas landscape by myself by car. That August marked a year alone in Tucson and suddenly the desert felt like it could belong to me, no strings attached. Like I, too, could project a semiotics of selfdiscovery and reinvention as some kind of lulling counterpoint to the settler colonial fantasy that lived in the marrow of such fictions. I staked my dream onto the desert.
Finally passing Van Horn, I detected the Milky Way above inching itself closer to the roof of my car, its purple galaxy swirling me into reverie. Can’t get used to losin’ you. … I reached for the sole beer I had been saving in my cooler and pulled the tab open. I took a long sip and let the hoppy goodness swish around inside my mouth. There was no one on the road except me.
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I knew of Marfa’s lore—a weird, high art vacation destination that pulled coastal elites into its western promise of freedom and untapped possibility. I also knew that the railroad tracks divided the brown community from the white. It would be interesting to be there while my friend, the artist rafa esparza, was in the middle of a summer residency. He had received a prestigious commission from Ballroom Marfa—the people responsible for commissioning that famous fake Prada store on Highway 90 just outside of Valentine, Texas.5
Welcome to Marfa. I had no signal whatsoever on my phone and hoped I could find rafa’s summer house. I stopped in a Dairy Queen parking lot and used the restaurant’s wi-fi to pull up the map pin that rafa had dropped in his last text to me. I was glad I could recall reading a map without the GPS lady intoning orders to me. Thankful for all those years of reading Thomas Guides in the back seat of my father’s 1982 Mercury Zephyr. I managed to find the spacious bungalow in tasteful wood grain and metal-colored earth tones with a mudsplattered, white pickup truck parked out front.
Dang, rafis. Rafa came out of the house wearing a cream-colored shawl and ushered me inside. It was so good to see him, happy and thriving in this strange place offering him unabashed support for his art. New York–level support. He was hitting the big time. We stayed up until two in the morning recounting recent heartbreaks and hair-raising encounters with law enforcement in the borderlands while drinking fine mezcal from a bottle that looked straight out of the Tudors.
By the time I woke up the next morning, rafa had left for his “studio,” an open field next to the hipster hotel where he had built a muddy bank next to a pile of straw. He had been making hundreds of adobe bricks all summer. His show opened at the end of the month, so the clock was ticking. I had only gone three days without bleeding and, of course, it started again that morning. That marked six months straight of bleeding. The doctor I saw back in Tucson put my gold-star lesbian womb on birth control, and the adjustment was proving difficult. I made sure I had my provisions and left the house to find my way to the mud pit. It would be a collision of messes, but I was ready.
Seeing Marfa by day activated all the complicated nostalgia meridians in my body. There were street signs that rung of old-timey Americana and the water tower that boasted MARFA on its belly. But it was still West Texas; its history of denigrating treatment of Mexicans spilled into the quotidian, and that reality never escaped me. Still, I felt a star-crossed romance for this doubly crossed place, as my friend the Los Angeles writer Rubén Martínez denotes aptly—Marfa is a place that boasts:
railroad tracks upon which trains clacked through a couple of times a day, meaning you could hear bona fide train whistles—enchanting for any city boy or girl. The tracks, of course, also meant that there were another side of them, where the “Mexicans” lived; that’s what they called themselves, and what everyone else called them, too, in spite of the fact that many of them were second- or third- or fourth-generation on this side of the border, speaking Spanglish, English with a Mexican accent and Spanish with a gringo accent. On that other side of the tracks sat the adobe ruin of the town’s old segregated school.
I soon met up with rafa’s team: Rubén aka Fresca, the queer baby femme Chicanx multimedia artist from El Paso, who was on mud duty, mixing water into a fresh swath of soil and straw. And Sandro Canovas from Mexico City, the hetero-intellectual whose life’s work examined the Mexican history of adobe architecture, was carting mud back and forth with the wheelbarrow. Fresca urged me to wear a weightlifting belt for protection, so I donned one and helped shovel mud into the wheelbarrow, trying to keep up with my stronger collaborators. But they took pity on me after seeing me nearly drop the wheelbarrow full of mud one too many times and handed me a pair of knee pads. They said I would be better off washing the brick molds and making bricks with rafa. I happily obliged, though I knew one task wouldn’t be any easier than the other.
In Los Angeles, rafa had made his name as the artist who invited anyone and everyone to come make adobe bricks with him. The bricks became his frames, often laid out as the floor of any given gallery or museum. The adobe transformed these traditional sites of artistic presentation. Down with white walls, down with white cubes. Forgoing the decolonizing rhetoric and opting for indigenizing these art practices, brown artists could present in a visual vernacular that resonated with their immigrant and Native origins. An homage to his father, who built his first familial house in Durango, Mexico, out of adobe with his bare hands. These bricks, for rafa, call on that ancestral knowledge as a way to center immigrant labor practices in the U.S., bringing into the sight line those who have been marginalized by the avant-garde and the art market. An homage to those protected by the mud of madre tierra.
It was finally my turn to help him make bricks, a practice that had always scared me off with its demand of intense physical exertion. But I was there, ready to sweat and ache, to find a way to stave off the spasms of want that haunted all of my days that year. I dug my hand in the wet soil. It wasn’t the first time. Each time always came with a jolt, a feel-good oxytocin-like high that surprised me again and again. It was here this whole time, beneath my feet. It was one thing to walk barefoot on a concrete-less earth, to feel blades of grass between my toes. But plunging my fingers, hands, and wrists into the terrestrial mix felt ecstatic.
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I ran into Sandy at the coffee shop in downtown Tucson two days after returning home from Marfa. But isn’t that how we run into our exes these days? In the coffee shop, checking their social media presences that confirm their material absences in our lives? It had been a year since we had last seen each other. She jumped into a new relationship a month after ours ended. I was still single but about to hit-and-run several relationships. She and I differed when it came to the classic lesbian conundrum of U-Haul dating.
I sat down at her table, hubris or desperation fueling the coming soliloquy. Sandy didn’t say much besides I don’t know. I kept asking the same question in a dozen ways: How are you? I looked at her with soft eyes. If there was ever another chance to do this again I would. I let my voice trail off while my hands white-knuckled the Topo Chico bottle that had become slippery with sweat despite my grip. She finally looked away.
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I left the coffee shop in a victorious stupor. She hadn’t said “no,” I thought to myself. I went home with a renewed sense of desire for what could be, yet knew the odds weren’t in my favor. I was a meme that made fun of Pisces, but I didn’t care.
I don’t know which was more self-induced—the sabotage or the delusion. But I chalked up my magical thinking to the ancestral seizures that occur on hikes or other communes with the nature Tucson offered. Seizures in the capturing sense—where I feel oceanic toward the desert’s beauty, a beauty permeated by the slow yet painful realization of colonization. It’s a pain that punctuates every encounter since then and the histories I’ll never be able to undo for those who came before me. Seizures that compel me to wonder at the hummingbird sitting still in the mesquite or the moth landing in my lazy pompadour as I wander and wait for the sun to set over Gates Pass in the Western edges of Tucson’s city limits. Seizures as in maybe my ancestors were telling me not to give up on her, filling my head with the language of retrieval. Get her back. Is this why we make art? To chase or attract? Lover or muse, angel or devil, ancestral memory or unhealthy obsession—my duende sought her out.
Everywhere I looked Sandy’s laughter and melancholy remained imprinted over these difficult terrains from Tucson to Marfa. Even walking Donald Judd’s concrete structures found me cursing the prison of desire closing in on me. I was walking the labyrinth in perpetuity, lockstep with her, as one absence gave way to several others.
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These tropes might register in that familiar way that threatens their originality. But I had never felt this way before and the arrival to a new language takes time.
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When we first started communicating, I would jokingly suggest to Sandy that she leave the hacienda and join the revolution.
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I brought my altar to the shrine of the sinner. A petition for my lost lover to make her way back to me. And the only place that could house my humble-yet-unreasonable request was El Tiradito. A place built on the burial site of one Juan Olivares, an eighteen-year-old worker who began an illicit love affair with the doña of the hacienda he worked for in a changing Tucson after the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. Some stories cite the object of Olivares’s affections as his mother-in-law, but a story of classed desire seems more plausible considering the impenetrable caste system of the day. Olivares was shot and his body dumped in a nearby ditch where neighbors buried him on the spot. A few months later, people began to notice miracles taking place, inspiring them to build a chapel in honor of Olivares, the one who was cast out.
A yellow candle, a couple of cigarettes, some yellow flowers stuffed into the same Topo Chico bottle I had clutched earlier that day, and a sign taped to a couple of old drum sticks that read: Regresa A Mi.
4. Maya L. Kapoor, “The Castaways,” Therritory, http://themapisnot.com/issue-iii-maya-l-kapoor/#canvas.
5. Prada Marfa is a permanently installed sculpture by artists Elmgreen and Dragset, situated 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) northwest of Valentine, Texas, just off U.S. Highway 90.