Archangel of the Tohono O'odham

On my last day in Arizona, my granddaughter Crystal's partner Saul drove us out to Mission San Xavier del Bac. (The linked website for the mission is interesting in a number of ways.) On the way out there, Saul explained that he grew up in South Tucson, which is only about a twenty-minute drive from the Mission. His mother visited the mission often when Saul was a little boy. He and his three brothers and two sisters would race around outside playing games while she went in to light candles and pray, and he has fond memories of the place. 

It was built by Native Americans, the Tohono O'odham people. The land where it stands is now part of the small "Reservation" set aside for the Tohono O'odham by a series of shameful so-called "treaties" negotiated by the US Government after decades of genocide. The USA "bought" this land, from colonizers in Mexico, and the Roman Catholic Church established the Mission and mission school that is still in operation. The architecture is of Spanish design that includes a number of Islamic elements, but it was the Tohono O'odham who supplied the labor, the soul, and the aesthetic vision for the interior.

Sculptors, painters, and craftsmen from Mexico traveled north through the desert over several generations in the 18th and 19th centuries to create the murals, the woodwork, the plaster statuary, and the artistry on the inside. I particularly love this archangel--whether it's supposed to be St. Michael, St. Gabriel, or one of the others I can't say, but it looks Tohono O'odham to me. 

Raiden is teething, and his maternal grandfather (my elder son) was not feeling well, so we didn't stay long, though I would have loved to. I have visited San Xavier on every visit to Tucson since I lived there in the 60s, but this was my first time to go with someone who had grown up in its shadows.