Our taxi driver was supposed to be taking us a few blocks down the road for dinner. But we’d been in the cab, weaving around other cars, aggressively accelerating then quickly breaking for at least 10 minutes. “Almost there!” He would assure us over the blaring Spanish rap CD in the car stereo. The three…
Inside the neon green and yellow shack on 6th Avenue, a few blocks outside of South Tucson, there are four rows of connected seats facing the entrance and a gray television set broadcasting an episode of Malcolm in the Middle dubbed in Spanish. A glossy Mexican national flag is painted across the wall behind the rows…
Rainbow-colored telavera animals crowd the outside of Casa Maya de Mexico in the self-described “artist colony” of Tubac where metalwork shaped into suns and moons, paper mache skeletons from Día de los muertos, and wooden religious figures join them. María Troy, who has worked at Casa Maya de Mexico for the last two years, helps bring…
Natalie Guerrero Hernández wants to be a nurse when she grows up. Possibly. “Medicine. Or also architecture or graphic design. Those are the things I like the most,” she said. Natalie is a soft-spoken, hard-working 14-year-old who gets good grades and has big dreams for her future. She’s thinking about college and the importance…
Thick, rusty-brown steel plates loom 20-feet high over Ambos Nogales, signaling the physical and symbolic delineation between the United States and Mexico. Ana Teresa Fernández wants to change that. In October, she took to the streets with her tools of resistance, paint and a paint brush, to “erase the border” in Ambos Nogales. She…
