Holiday Events & Performances
Downtown Parade of Lights
Stone and 6th Avenues, from 17th Street to Congress Street, 547-3338, www.DowntownTucson.org.
Beginning at 4:00pm on Saturday, December 13, a series of free entertainment will be available for the community to enjoy before the parade begins. The entertainment this year is coordinated by the Tucson Arts District Partnership. The schedule is as follows:
4:00pm—Alberto Gallegos performs with mariachi accompaniment
5:30pm—The Tucson Girls Chorus
6:00pm—Kids Unlimited
6:30pm—Handbell Choir
7:15pm—Desert Voices Choral Performance
7:15pm—The Winter Lights Parade reaches the main stage
7:45pm—The Annual Holiday Sing. The performance and sing along is conducted by Dr. Carroll Rinehart, and sponsored by Fox 11, KMSB and the Tucson Arts District Partnership.
8:15pm—Symphonic Winds Family Holiday Concert
An Arts and Crafts Fair will be held at Armory Park from 4:00pm until 9:00pm. Artists interested in participating in the fair should contact the Tucson Arts District Partnership at 624-9977. A variety of one-of-a kind gifts items will be for sale. Food vendors will be on hand providing a variety of warm treats from 4:00pm until 9:00pm. Free parking is available at all the downtown parking meters. Please be advised that there will be no parking available to the public on east side of 6th Avenue between 13th Street and 17th Street. This is where the parade staging will occur.
The 9th Annual Downtown Parade of Lights, presented by Tucson Illuminations starts at 6:00pm.
Armory Park Senior Center
220 S. 5th Ave., 791-4865.
The center kicks off its holiday happenings with a Holiday Festival on December 13 from 9:00am to 9:00pm. The Center’s Christmas Party is December 17 from 12:30pm to 2:00pm. A Christmas Dance is December 20, 7:00pm to 10:00pm and their New Year’s Eve Ball commences at 7:00pm on Wednesday, December 31 with a catered dinner served at 8:00pm.
Ballet Folklorico de Mexico
Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd., 621-3341, www.BalletAmalia.com.
“Navidades” celebrates Mexico’s Christmas customs and traditions. This is the troupe’s newest production in more than 25 years. The shows are December 16-18, 7:30pm.
Ballet Tucson
Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd., 903-1445.
In its eighteenth season, Ballet Tucson presents Christmas classic “The Nutcracker,” Friday, December 12 through Sunday, December 14, with evening and matinee performances.
Bohemia – An Artisans Emporium
299 S. Park Ave., 882-0800.
Every Saturday until December 20, Bohemia presents “Shopping Soirees” for the holiday season. The events run from 4:00pm to 7:00pm and include live music, massage, refreshments, giveaways and extended shopping hours. December 6 features local duo Under the Sun, December 13 has solo artist Kristy Kruger performing, and the December 20 finale will showcase surprise guests and drumming.
Desert Voices
Muse, 516 N. 5th Ave., 791-9662.
Tucson’s GLBT chorus celebrates its 15th season with Home (Oh!) For the Holidays, a performance featuring a wide range of holiday songs and a special appearance in the second act with “Sugar Plum Fairy Bear.” Saturday, December 6 at 7:30pm and Sunday, December 7 at 3:00pm.
El Centro Cultural de Las Americas
40 W. Broadway, 629-9536.
A Mexican Christmas market with figurines and other items for nativity scenes and holiday décor. All month.
Fourth Avenue Merchants’ Association
University to 9th Street, 624-5004, www.FourthAvenue.org.
Vendors from all over sell their wares from Friday, December 12 through Sunday, December 14 during the Winter Street Fair.
The Glass Studio @ Sonoran Art Foundation
633 W. 18th St., 884-7814, www.SonoranGlass.com.
Saturdays on December 6, 13, and 20 gives individuals and groups the chance to experience the art of glassblowing and creating a unique holiday ornament. Call, log on or email sonoranglass@yahoo.com to enroll in the workshop.
Holy Resurrection Christian Orthodox Choir
Crowder Hall (UA Music Building), 1717 E. Speedway Blvd., 250-173.
Celebrate 25 years of church choir music under the direction of Mareena Boosamra. The gala, scheduled for Saturday, December 13, will benefit the building fund for their new church.
LaughingStock Comedy Company
Zuzi’s Little Theatre, 738 N. 5th Ave., 749-3800.
LaughingStock Comedy Company sends up the holidays with an evening of improvisational comedy. Join this nationally touring comedy troupe for a fun, funny and rare hometown performance series. Shows are Thursday, December 18 through Saturday, December 20; Friday, December 26 to Saturday, December 27; Wednesday, December 31 to Saturday, January 3. All shows start at 7:30pm.
Miracle on Church Street
Tucson Convention Center, 260 S. Church Ave., 818-1871, www.TucsonMiracle.org.
The ninth annual Children’s Holiday Party will benefit underprivileged children ages one to 12 years in and around the Tucson community. Contributions and volunteers are currently being sought to support this year’s event, scheduled for Saturday, December 20, 10:00am-4:00pm.
94.9 Holiday Cabaret
Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd., 621-3341
94.9 MIX FM celebrates the tenth anniversary of the December Diaper Drive, benefiting the Southern Arizona Community Diaper Bank A live radio play, The Tucson version of A Christmas Carol, will be followed by An Evening with John Tesh. The festivities begin at 7:00pm on Sunday, December 7.
Old Town Artisans & La Cocina Restaurant
201 N. Court Ave., 623-6024.
Luminaria Night, on Saturday, December 13, will host holiday music by the Santa Barbara Project. Shops are open late this evening and refreshments will include special holiday cider, cookies, and spirits.
Tree Lighting Ceremony
Armory Park, 6th Avenue – between 12th and 13th Streets
Mayor Walkup will officially light the holiday trees, and a performance by Kids Unlimited will follow. This year a group of colorful holiday trees created by a series of lights will be on display in front of the Tucson Children’s Museum.
Tucson Boys Chorus
Tucson Convention Center Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave., 296-6277, www.BoysChorus.org.
Ring in the season with a distinctive selection of holiday songs on Sunday, December 14 at 3:00pm and 7:30pm.
Tucson Children’s Museum
200 S. 6th Avenue, 792-9985, www.TucsonChildrensMuseum.org.
TCM presents its Festival of Lights all month with themed events that teach children how holidays are celebrated around the world. The festivals are scheduled from 1:00pm to 4:00pm and include Diwali, Polish Christmas, Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Japanese New Year.
Tucson Girls Chorus
Tucson Convention Center, 260 S. Church Ave., 577-6064.
Tucson Girls Chorus presents its annual holiday concert on Saturday, December 13 from 7:30pm to 9:30pm.
Tucson Museum of Art
140 N. Main Ave., 624-2333, www.TucsonArts.com.
All month, TMA showcases more than 300 earthen figurines in a traditional Mexican (El Nacimiento) nativity scene at the restored 1800s La Casa Cordova. On Saturday, December 13 TMA hosts a holiday party at the Corbett House with a holiday open house and a special exhibition in the museum.
Tucson Regional Ballet
Tucson Convention Center Leo Rich Theatre, 260 S. Church Ave., 791-4266.
A Southwestern Nutcracker translates the traditional Nutcracker to Tucson in the 1880’s. TRB performs with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra.
Tucson Symphony Orchestra
Tucson Convention Center Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave., 882-8585, www.TucsonSymphony.com.
TSO presents Home For The Holidays Friday, December 19 through Sunday, December 21. On Saturday, December 20, the symphony performs a Holiday Magic Family Concert at 11:00am.
Tucson Traders & The Casbah Tea House
624-1/2 N. 4th Ave., 388-8844
From 11:30am to 3:30pm on Saturday, December 6, the 6th Annual Holiday Craft Fair and Trade Bazaar will showcase local and international gifts, crafts, art, fine food, exotic teas, coffees, music and local business samplers. 
Controversies Fail to Dim Residents’ Love for Barrio Viejo
by James Reel
This is the third article in a series about Downtown-area neighborhoods. The Downtown Tucsonan will continue to cover important issues of interest in the neighborhoods. Coming up in a future issue: Menlo Park.
he district south of the Tucson Convention Center certainly seems peaceful enough: quiet streets abutted by houses of thick adobe walls, many of which have stood for more than a century. Yet this is one of the most contentious neighborhoods Downtown; residents and landowners argue over whether historic-preservation rules are a necessary protection or a burden to longtime homeowners, whether or not public housing is a detriment to the area, whether a proposed rails-to-trails park along unused railroad tracks will create a neighborhood amenity or a magnet for the homeless, and whether or not the influx of Anglo residents and lawyers’ offices into the traditionally Hispanic residential area is a cultural boon or burden.
There’s even a dispute over which name applies to which areas of the neighborhood. Officially, the City has designated the area bounded on the north by Cushing Street, on the east by Stone Avenue, on the west by Interstate 10 and on the south by 18th Street as Barrio Viejo. Some would shrink the boundaries of Barrio Viejo, assigning blocks to other neighborhoods, such as Santa Rosa. The place is also called Barrio Historico, and the official name of the historic district is “Barrio Libre”. About a dozen years ago, one graffitist distressed by the area’s gentrification spray-painted a wall with the designation “Barrio Gringo.”
Whatever you call this place, and whatever the points of contention may be, one thing does unite the area’s inhabitants: a deep love of the barrio, its architecture and culture. And a determination not to allow a replay of the misguided urban-renewal projects that destroyed dozens of acres of the barrio in the 1960s.
Around 1800, this was Tucson’s only suburb, the first substantial residential area to develop outside the walls of the 1775 presidio. Later in the 19th century, when the United States gained control of Southern Arizona, this remained the Mexican-American side of town, while the Anglos clustered to the north. Initially called Barrio Libre because the Anglos left the residents fairly free to follow their own laws within their neighborhood, the district rises elegantly from the land in block after block of colorfully painted 19th-century Sonoran row houses, built of adobe, mesquite and saguaro ribs. Almost all the new houses filling in the barrio’s few remaining vacant lots echo this style.
But it was a style little valued by Tucson politicians and bureaucrats before the 1970s, and the neighborhood’s Hispanic residents, many of them poor, lacked the clout to save some 80 acres from being bulldozed in the 1960s to make way for the TCC and new government buildings. So much for the nation’s largest concentration of flush-street Sonoran-style buildings. About 1,200 people, many of whose families had lived here for more than a century, were displaced.
That trauma left the barrio’s remaining residents with deep psychological scars. To this day, many of the old-timers are suspicious of what they regard as municipal meddling in their neighborhood, and some resent the gentrification that began in the 1970s and has accelerated in the past few years. It’s not uncommon for new houses to sell for $300,000, or a two-bedroom rental to command $700 a month. Values of older property have risen steeply—and so have property taxes, creating a burden for the barrio’s longtime but low-income families.
The City has offered a tax assistance program to low-income residents, but few have taken advantage of it—only nine households signed up in the first five years.
And then there’s the expense and red tape of abiding by the City’s historic-district zoning standards. Nearly one-fifth of the barrio’s residents have signed a petition demanding to opt out of those restrictions on their properties, without requiring all residents to abandon the zoning regulations.
Ironically, some of the residents most resistant to the historic-preservation regulations have the deepest roots in the barrio. Pedro Gonzales, who has lived in the barrio since 1960, is one of the leaders of the resistance. He did not return phone calls regarding this article, but in September he complained to an Arizona Daily Star reporter that the zoning restrictions and fancy new infill houses were putting too much pressure on the area’s longtime residents. He seemed to stop just short of likening current policies to the urban-renewal bulldozing of the 1960s when he said, “We don’t like this because they are forcing the families out by increasing the property values and taxes.”
Betsy Rollings, a member of the Tucson-Pima County Historical Commission and whose family owns several barrio properties, including the Cushing Street Café, strongly supports optional withdrawal from the zoning regulations. “People have to pay a $100 fee to have their plans reviewed even if they’re just putting up a mailbox,” she says.
According to Rollings, the nature of the peer review process—and the enforcement of the regulations, which relies on residents to report their neighbors’ violations—“has done a great deal of damage to the fabric of the neighborhood, having neighbors sit in judgment of each other. You should be able to rejoice when a neighbor can fix up his house; you shouldn’t have to come over and say, ‘I don’t think the brick on that parapet is the right kind of brick.’
“A lot of hard feelings have come to exist between neighbors who would ordinarily like one another, and the City sat back and watched them do battle. It’s not healthy for a neighborhood. It’s more important to make links between people than preserve the original windows on a building.”
People take these conflicts seriously. Guadalupe de la Torre-Montaño who lives and teaches art on West 17th Street, says some of her neighbors stopped speaking to her when she advocated the demolition of the Drachman School to make way for subsidized housing units for the elderly.
“They wanted to save the school, but the actual historic building had burned down,” she says. “It’s nice to conserve historic buildings if they are for real, if they are original, but that building wasn’t, and if one has to be sacrificed for the good of 62 elderly people, I go for sacrificing the building.”
But not everyone in the area feels that the historic requirements are unreasonably burdensome. “The historical restrictions are generally favored by the people living and building down there,” says realtor Beth Jones, who spends a great deal of time showing property to people now beginning to realize that Barrio Viejo is a neighborhood of choice. “The historical restrictions are not difficult to abide by, and they keep the beautiful integrity of the barrio community.”
“Making low-income property owners jump through hoops and spend extra money to upgrade their property has been a big issue,” concedes 4th Avenue businessman Stephen Paul, who moved to the barrio with his wife in 1978. “It has happened sometimes that people have had to put in a wood door where a less expensive door could have been better economically. But the fact is, these are mud boxes. There isn’t a lot of ornamentation and expensive things you have to do to this type of architecture.”
Architect Corky Poster, a member of the Rio Nuevo District Board who has been involved in several site plans for the area, believes it wouldn’t be hard to serve everyone’s interests. “For individuals [historic zoning] can create difficult circumstances. But for the district as a historic remnant of what Tucson used to be, you don’t need many bad architectural mistakes to ruin something that’s fragile,” he says. “My solution is to provide the technical assistance folks need to conform, so the burden isn’t on the low-income homeowner. With appropriate technical assistance, the long-term interest of the community in preserving that remnant of a time past could still happen.”
Gentrification is an issue more difficult to approach; although it mostly revolves around class, in Barrio Viejo gentrification also involves matters of race and cultural integrity and diversity.
Poster makes a distinction between two kinds of gentrification. One is household substitution, in which a low-income household is replaced by an upper-income household. The other involves replacing a household with an office, and that’s of particular concern to Poster, who predicts that commercial use could easily spread south from Cushing Street all the way down to 22nd Street and beyond.
“Lower income families need long-term protection from gentrification,” he says. “The solution is to guarantee permanent affordable housing in the neighborhood. That upper-end stuff will move in, but if you provide new affordable housing and protect the low-income folks, you end up with a mixed-income neighborhood, which is a good thing. It’s not a good thing when, through the economic leverage that some folks have, other people get displaced.”
As for the issues of race and culture, the complexion of the barrio has definitely changed over the past three decades. Relative newcomers like Paul, who has lived there a mere 25 years, recognize they’re in a rather awkward position but make no apologies for becoming part of the barrio fabric.
“Oddly enough, there’s just one longtime Latina left on our block,” he says. “After her, we are the oldest people on the block. It’s a very weird sensation. But we’re still close as a neighborhood. Our longtime Latino and black neighbors have been very good neighbors, and we’ve been good neighbors back to them. We do repairs on the homes of the elderly ladies, and they make us enchilada dinners when we’re working long days, and they watch our kids. It’s a real neighborhood.”
“In a way it’s sad that some of the Mexicans have moved out,” says de la Torre-Montaño, “but it’s very nice what the others are doing to our neighborhood.”
Even more remains to be done, but most of the projects residents and business owners talk about fall under the City’s purview.
“We’ve got water mains that are 100 years old and not holding pressure, crumbling sidewalks, no street lights and bad drainage,” says Rollings. “The City has not maintained the public right of way. There are far more amenities in other neighborhoods.”
Meanwhile, the plan to convert the railroad spur along I-10 into a park—a “rails to trails” greenway—is getting mixed reviews. People including de la Torre-Montaño and Jones strongly favor it; others are more cautious, for a variety of reasons.
“I think it’s a terrific idea,” says Poster, “but I don’t know that it’s been put to enough public discussion. It needs a whole bunch of public scrutiny and input, and the wisdom of a lot of eyes and ears. Land use projects always make me nervous.”
Stephen Paul would surely give planners an earful. “In a city that didn’t have the huge homeless-services industry we have concentrated Downtown, that would be a wonderful thing,” he says. “But we have a similar park a few hundred yards to the west, which is so overrun with homeless people that fewer residents use it than should. My fear is this will become just another homeless-infested park. I’m all in favor of taking care of people in Tucson who become homeless, but I am totally opposed to taking on the problem of the rest of the nation’s homeless. We cannot handle the volume that our city has brought on. Our city does not do a good job of protecting its constituents from the petty crime and annoyance, and some major crime, that the homeless-services industry brings to Tucson.”
Betsy Rollings says she’s “absolutely in favor” of the greenway, but wishes the City would do even more to provide landscaped pedestrian links to the barrio’s surrounding areas. “They need to break up those boundaries at the community center and the police station, and allow a more natural flow of people,” she says. “That would bring people back together, as opposed to making hard boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
Despite the internal disputes over the nature and future of Barrio Viejo, at least there are not yet insurmountable boundaries between the neighbors. After all, they’re still arguing with each other, rather than each barricading themselves inside a silent Sonoran row-house fortress. They’re still cooking enchiladas for each other, watching each other’s kids, keeping an eye on the streets and not tolerating criminal activity. And they have the gumption to band together to fight City Hall, or to defend its policies.
“We’re still close as a neighborhood,” says Paul. “We talk to each other. It’s a real neighborhood, just as it was in 1978 and before we came here. I miss the way it used to be. But having said that, I love the way it is now.”
