De Grazia: The Man and the Myths

12: On a Mission

108 12 On a Mission Religion now-a-days is intellectual and not spiritual—and that I think is bad. —De Grazia1 By The early 1950s, Tucson’s rapid growth so aggravated De Grazia that he wanted to get out of the “crowded” city closing in on him and into the open spaces of the Santa Catalina Mountains north of the city. From that momentous day in Altar Valley when he had first dreamed about building a mission, he had spent hours hiking throughout the Catalina Foothills looking for the right spot for it. He wanted to build a mission like the small shrines he often found in Mexican towns and villages.2 He finally found the place, ten acres off Pontatoc Road along what is now Swan Road. He paid $2,300 for the land, which was divided by a small wash, and began construction in the spring of 1952.3 Marion wrote of his relationship with the land: The desert was all his as far as the eye could see. There it was beautiful. It was quiet. He did not disturb the desert. He became a part of it.4 On December 12, 1952, De Grazia and his Indian friends paid their first tribute to Our Lady of Guadalupe with a small celebration. After placing candles along the unfinished mission walls, they played music and feasted on tamales and tequila.5 On a Mission 109 A year later, De Grazia said the mission would soon be completed, “if I have enough time and money and energy and if Uncle Sam leaves me alone.” De Grazia used natural materials to construct the mission—some of it rocks from Morenci—much as craftsmen from centuries earlier had done. Water was scarce on the foothills site, except for rainwater De Grazia managed to collect. To make adobe for the walls, he used his beat-up, rusty Model A with a rumble seat to haul water in fiftygallon barrels from his Campbell studio. He followed Campbell to River Road; drove four miles east to Pontatoc Road; then took a dirt road. After that he drove his own road, which he’d had to create, to get to his property. He called it the Iron Door Mine Road.6 He even posted signs with his name on them that pointed toward his property.7 Visitors had to bring five gallons of water every time they came to the site. “There were no amenities there at all,” said Fred Landeen.8 Years later, Karen Thure, a freelance writer, and her husband visited the Swan Road gallery. “God, those studios were uncomfortable. . . . I mean, little mice running around the place, and dust and Figure 22. De Grazia hauled wood and water to his Swan Road site in the rumble seat of his Ford. chapTer 12 110 cobwebs . . . not just filthy but definitely debris and the helter-skelter detritus of a brilliant mind that didn’t care about all the detail. . . . It was all very impulsive the way he lived.”9 No church ever consecrated De Grazia’s mission. He was a religious man—but not a churchgoing one. He saw God in the world around him. God “is a man whom I worship,” De Grazia said. “I admire his righteousness. I take and ask for no favors from him.”10 Later he would say, “Personally I will accept what God deals to me without question. I pray because I was taught to pray. I pray my way, not the way they teach. I pray inside of me. I believe everybody prays. But I don’t ask favors. In other words, I don’t want Him to spare me while others must suffer.”11 Rick Brown said that while he thought De Grazia was a very religious man, he had his “own things that he believed.”12 Rita Davenport , who wrote a cookbook that De Grazia illustrated in 1973, agreed that he had a “religiosity” about him. “I just know he believed in God and he was very spiritual and that’s the reason he built” the mission, she said. “He built that to thank God for what he’d done, to give back some of the blessings.”13 De Grazia built the mission in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Roman Catholic icon of the Virgin Mary. Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patroness of the Americas; she is also a traditional...