El Tiradito, The Wishing Shrine of Barrio Viejo

In the old adobe neighborhood south of downtown Tucson, on a low wall that faces a quiet street, thousands of candles have burned over more than a century. This is El Tiradito, the Wishing Shrine, and it holds the distinction of being the only shrine in the United States dedicated to a sinner rather than a saint, someone buried in unconsecrated ground, killed in disgrace, and memorialized by a community that refused to forget him.

The legend of El Tiradito has several versions, but they all center on a fatal love triangle in the early eighteen seventies. The most commonly told account names Juan Oliveras, a young man who married into a wealthy Tucson ranching family. Oliveras fell in love with his mother-in-law. Her husband discovered the affair and killed Oliveras with an ax, leaving the body where it fell. In grief and guilt, the mother-in-law buried Juan on that spot, and the neighborhood began placing candles on the grave. The belief that grew around it was simple: if your candle burns through the night, your wish will be granted.

El Tiradito, meaning the little outcaste or the one who was thrown aside, became a living piece of Tucson's Barrio Viejo, the old neighborhood of Mexican-American adobe homes that had stood since the territorial period. When city planners in the early nineteen seventies proposed routing a cross-town freeway directly through Barrio Viejo, displacing nearly twelve hundred people, neighborhood activists moved quickly. In nineteen seventy-one, they successfully nominated El Tiradito to the National Register of Historic Places, making it the first property in Arizona listed on that registry specifically because of its folkloric and cultural significance, not its architectural merit or historical event.

The historic designation halted the freeway. Barrio Viejo was preserved. The shrine still stands on South Main Avenue, still flickering with candle flames left by people hoping the darkness will do them a favor.