Santa Cruz County Muralism

The Present Meets the Past (2024), Nogales Public Library

As part of the summer 2024 “Murals on Morley” Program sponsored by the County Superintendent’s Beyond Fronteras/Invest in Our Youth initiatives, Rio Rico High School art teacher Miguel Grijalva worked with teen volunteers to create a stunning mural for the Nogales Public Library’s lobby. Grijalva, an accomplished muralist with works adorning numerous public buildings in Arizona and Sonora (including the Magdalena de Kino municipal palace), combined aspects of the Mexican muralism tradition as well as Chicano (or Mexican American) Movement muralism to create a piece highlighting different aspects of Santa Cruz County history.

Almost like a collection of photographs, the mural depicts our area’s heritage with a jaguar named “Libélula,” a young girl painting pottery with an early Hohokam woman, missionary Eusebio Kino reading with a young boy, Spanish colonial leader Juan Bautista de Anza sharing ideas with a teen, a Mexican family playing music and dancing during a Sonoran Desert night, the 1918 Battle of Ambos Nogales, and the forced removals of Santa Cruz Valley families as part of the Baca Float #3 corporate landownership scheme during the 1910s.

All of Mr. Grijalva and his students’ scenes are visual representations of articles in Beyond Fronteras’s “Nogalepedia” gallery. The synthesizing of local history through these artistic depictions are a form of higher-level analytical thinking that Mr. Grijalva’s “Murals on Morley” program achieved. Indeed, the self-portraits of our teen muralists interacting with our county’s historical figures is an example of this critical thinking.

Furthermore, this mural is the first public artistic representation of our county’s ancient Indigenous Hohokam heritage (integrating pottery designs found in archaeological studies of the Nogales Wash Site), the Baca Float #3 mass evictions, and the 1918 Battle of Ambos Nogales which led to the building of the first border fences between two sister cities along the U.S.-Mexican border.

The Present Meets the Past was officially dedicated for the Nogales Public Library during a ceremony on August 1, 2024.

Nogales Public Library

518 N. Grand Avenue, Nogales, AZ 85621

An October (1915) Day in Ambos Nogales (2024), Historic Santa Cruz County Courthouse

During the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years, Nogales High School history teacher Luke Brannen worked with students in his International Baccalaureate “History of the Americas” courses to create a visual depiction of the local history they were learning in their classes. An October (1915) Day in Ambos Nogales is a whimsical depiction of what it might have been like if different historical actors who lived in Nogales during the early 1900s would have met along the pre-fenced U.S.-Mexican border between the two Nogales.

The majority of the figures are significant leaders from the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution which significantly impacted Southern Arizona and neighboring Sonora, including Francisco “Pancho” Villa, Sonoran General Alvaro Obregon, and Mexican President Venustiano Carranza (who briefly operated from Nogales, Mexico) among others. Their U.S. counterparts include Henry Ossian Flipper, the first African American graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a noted community leader in 1890s-1900s Nogales, U.S. General John J. Pershing, and members of the African American Buffalo Soldiers who were stationed at the former Camp Little army base in Nogales. Camp Little’s namesake, Private Stephen Little, is also shown in this image. Adding to this scene are depictions of trains arriving in town and some of our local wildlife, including the Mexican golden eagle as well as jaguars and bobcats being friendly with cattle.

To give his students an intellectual and emotional investment in their project, Mr. Brannen assigned different roles for the young people, including Project Manager Hilary Brigitte Santillan. The youths’ sense of ownership was also expanded by giving certain students specific sections of the mural to work on, allowing one student the opportunity to depict his grandparents getting married in Nogales, Arizona, roughly during the period shown in the mural. Like the Present Meets the Past Mural, this humorous and colorful mural combines creativity with a higher-level synthesis of Arizona social studies standards-aligned content knowledge to retell our community’s history in a fun and engaging manner.

An October (1915) Day in Ambos Nogales was officially dedicated during the grand opening celebration for the “Beyond Fronteras: Treasuring an Arizona Border Community’s Past and Present” exhibition on October 25, 2024, and is available for viewing in the rotunda of the recently-restored Historic County Courthouse building in downtown Nogales, Arizona.

Furthermore, this mural is the first public artistic representation of our county’s ancient Indigenous Hohokam heritage (integrating pottery designs found in archaeological studies of the Nogales Wash Site), the Baca Float #3 mass evictions, and the 1918 Battle of Ambos Nogales which led to the building of the first border fences between two sister cities along the U.S.-Mexican border.

The Present Meets the Past was officially dedicated for the Nogales Public Library during a ceremony on August 1, 2024.

Historic 1904 Santa Cruz County Courthouse
21 East Court Street, Nogales, AZ 85621

Student Muralists