Mission Lane: Triple Triptych

Mission Lane was an important route for Spanish and Mexican Tucson, connecting El Presidio to the Santa Cruz River, the convent, Mission Garden, and eventually San Xavier del Bac. The road was cut off by the construction of I-10 in the 1950s, as vividly documented in Lydia Otero’s In the Shadows of the Freeway: Growing up Brown & Queer (Planet Earth Press, 2019). 

I’m not interested in glorifying the Presidio nor its era, much less the freeway. But I find myself wandering outside my quotidian circuits, looking for the old routes obscured by Map.app, learning to see glimmers of the paths to come.

Here is a triple triptych of visual spells, divined just before and after dawn, from my ongoing series NoVoGRAFÍAS. Elements include aerial imagery, a map drawn by Nora Voutas for the book Autobiography of a Yaqui Poet by Refugio Savala (The University of Arizona Press, 1980), my own photographs, sigils and notes made while repeatedly walking this route: from my house to the base of Sentinel Peak and back.