El Tiradito

In 1927, Teofilo Otero deeded a lot on the west side of Main Avenue to the City of Tucson for the shrine, and the City Council accepted one account of its origin as the official version. The account came from Mrs. C. B. Perkins, whose father, Dr. F. H. Goodwin, had employed the dead man on his sheep ranch. In her telling, Juan Oliveras was a young shepherd who fell for his mother-in-law, who worked in Tucson. His father-in-law followed him into town, found the two of them together, and killed Juan with an axe taken from a woodpile. Devout women slipped through the brush at night to light candles at the grave, and came to believe that wishes made after praying for Juan came true.

A plaque on the site calls El Tiradito "the only shrine in the United States dedicated to the soul of a sinner buried in unconsecrated ground." In the Arizona and Sonora borderlands, a pile of rocks or a wooden cross often marks a sudden death, because a person who died without last rites is believed to need the prayers of the living.

The other versions

Moses Drachman, who was born in Tucson in 1870 and died in 1935, left a different account. A teamster who hauled freight from Magdalena or Hermosillo murdered his wife, and her grown son followed him to the camp by the spring near Simpson and Main and killed him there. A cross went up over the spot, and word spread that the dead man could perform miracles.

Jim Griffith, a retired University of Arizona folklorist, has recorded more than 20 versions, from love triangles to a man killed by a bullet as he walked past a barroom door. "The stories reveal not so much something about what happened, but they reveal a heck of a lot about the culture that tells the stories," Griffith told KJZZ in 2018.

Where the candles have stood

The first shrine stood near the middle of what is now Simpson Street, just west of Meyer Avenue. A 1975 nomination form in the shrine's National Register file quotes an early description of it as "a little collection of battered pieces of oil cans" beside "a dirty half-burned candle." A 2012 National Park Service survey dates the shrine to about 1870, and the 1975 file places it in the late 1870s.

When Simpson Street was cut through, the candles moved a short way to the northwest corner of Simpson and Main. The 1975 file puts that move between 1894 and 1909, and the Park Service survey puts it in the 1920s. The 1927 lot, about 90 feet north of that corner, is where the shrine has stood since. The Park Service survey found no record that anyone's remains were moved before the street was built across the first site.

In 1940, workers from the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program, built the adobe wall that frames the shrine now: a U shape about 12.5 feet tall at its curved crest, with a white plastered niche at the center. The Tucson Citizen reported in January 1940 that the shrine had been "surrounded by broken down automobiles and junk." A $5,000 block grant paid to restore the wall in 1982, and the city funded a second restoration in 2010, when the collapsed ends of the wall were rebuilt and the niche was replastered.

The 1975 file lists the site as "El Tiradito (Wishing Shrine)" and cites the folklorist Byrd Granger's view that it was the only such wishing shrine in the country, with a similar one in Sonora. The historian Mauro Trejo has said he believes the English name arrived with the shrine's life as a tourist stop.

The expressway

In 1966, urban renewal leveled 80 acres of mostly working-class Hispanic neighborhoods directly north of the shrine to make room for government buildings, a civic center, and shops. In 1971, a proposed expressway through Barrio Libre, now called Barrio Viejo, would have taken the shrine as well. Residents formed the El Tiradito Committee and pushed to list the site on the National Register of Historic Places, and the listing came on November 19, 1971.

The Park Service survey calls the listing "a major factor" in blocking the road. Next City's 2025 account gives the weight to years of neighborhood protest that delayed the road.

The Thursday vigil

In June 2000, the Coalición de Derechos Humanos began a Thursday night vigil at El Tiradito for migrants who died crossing the border from Mexico. Isabel Garcia and Jon Miles started it. The Park Service survey noted why the place fit: the migrants remembered there had also died without last rites, and many were buried or left where they fell. The vigil ran every week until May 2017 and has met once a month since.

The legend attached to the candles is that a wish comes true if a candle lit in the evening is still burning the next morning. Decades of wax have built up into a floor in front of the niche, and folded papers carrying wishes are pushed into gaps in the adobe.

The shrine is free to visit and sits back from South Main Avenue, beside the parking lot of El Minuto Café. People bring candles, flowers, photographs, and notes, and it's best practice to leave what others have left where it is.

The migrant vigil meets on the first Thursday of each month from 7pm to 7:30pm.

This is a working devotional site as well as a landmark, so it's best practice to ask before photographing someone who is praying, or to frame your shots so that people aren't included. The shrine sits at the edge of Barrio Viejo, where the adobe row houses on the surrounding streets are worth a walk.