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  • Barrio, Borderlands, and Beyond:Folk Religion and Universal Human Rights at Tucson's El TiraditoShrine
  • Lane Van Ham (bio)

On the edge of downtown Tucson, Arizona, in the historically Mexican American neighborhood Barrio Viejo ("the Old Barrio"), is a small, dirt lot that hosts a shrine known as El Tiradito. The shrine is an arched alcove augmented by a three-sided adobe structure that consists of a main wall, some fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide, with two sides that descend in staggered segments. Within the area embraced by the three walls stand a number of wrought-iron racks, which, like the tiers of the shrine and the ground beneath them, invariably bear an assortment of burning, seven-day candles.

Most visitors to El Tiradito come to petition for supernatural intervention in personal crises, and for this reason it has also been called the Wishing Shrine. The candles petitioners use to make their pleas have left a physical mark, for the shrine's back wall is stained with smoke and the earth at its fore is darkened with deposits of hardened wax. These features, combined with the structure's uneven sides, can give the initial impression of a burned-out building or ruin. But El Tiradito looks the way it does because of use and devotion, not neglect or disaster. It is invested with decades of purpose, desire, and intent, and in that accumulation of private aspirations it has also become the repository of collective dreams.

Every Thursday evening since summer 2000, the shrine has also hosted a vigil sponsored by the Tucson-based immigrant advocacy group Coalición de Derechos Humanos ("Human Rights Coalition"). During the vigil, participants circle in the middle of the lot for a short program of songs, [End Page 97] prayers, readings, announcements, and reflections to memorialize migrants who die in their attempts to illegally enter the United States from Mexico.

In some ways, the shrine is an improbable site for the vigil. For one, El Tiradito has traditionally been used for private, personal appeals to divine forces, and the individualism of supernatural petitions is arguably antithetical to the social vision of activism. Furthermore, the shrine has no historical connection to either migrants or mourning rites, and the vigil is not directed to the spirit for which El Tiradito is named.

Despite these incongruities, however, the choice of location is not arbitrary. It contains a logic derived from the shrine's status as a place of folk religion that also became a historic landmark and an emblem of barrio culture. This article seeks to explicate that logic by tracing the evolution of El Tiradito alongside an analysis of data collected during fieldwork with members of Derechos Humanos. The results suggest how decades of activity have made El Tiradito a cogent venue for the vigil, where secular and religious ideologies are synthesized into universalist concern over immigrant fatalities.

Derechos Humanos and border militarization in the 1990s

Illegal entry from Mexico has been a reality for as long as the United States has tried to implement official procedures for cross-border traffic,1 but only in recent years has southern Arizona seen the phenomenon become so deadly. A principle reason for the change is that since the 1990s the US government has significantly increased its efforts to control the border through deterrence. Funding and personnel for the Border Patrol more than tripled between 1993 and 2005 (González and Carroll), and the acquisition of high-tech equipment coupled with the establishment of collaborative ties with the armed forces have prompted some observers to describe the makeover as "militarization" (Dunn). As the Border Patrol cracked down in the mid 1990s by concentrating resources in urban zones like San Diego and El Paso, migrants shifted their routes to the perilous terrain of southern Arizona, which includes mountain ranges where the temperatures are freezing cold in the winter and deserts where summer temperatures of 110 degrees can become 170 degrees on the ground itself (Marizco). Desert crossers can suffer injuries like broken limbs and snakebites, and advanced cases of heat exposure can result in fatal damage to the brain and other internal organs.

The deadly consequences of the shift...

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