Come Follow "A Path to The River"

by Juliette Muise anci Kimi Eisele

"A Path to the River" was born during the fall of 1998. It began as a pilot program of the City of Tucson's Multiple Benefit Water Projects, a program involving neighborhoods in the decision-making process for future development and use of the Santa Cruz River. Through this program, Barrio Anita residents were invited to participate in several meetings and workshops. Together with students at Davis Bilingual Magnet School they proposed a series of public art works to commemorate the historical connection between Barrio Anita (north of St. Mary's and Granada) and the Santa Cruz River. The artworks (sculptures, murals, historical markers, etc.) will create a historical timeline from the 20th century to the 1770s when Apaches inhabited the area.

We are kids from Davis Bilingual Magnet School and Roskruge Bilingual Middle School. Our ages range from 6 to 13. We started the project by researching the 20th-century connection between Barrio Anita and the Santa Cruz River. We met during the "School After Dark" Safe Haven at Davis. We invited people who lived in the neighborhood. We asked questions and they told us stories. Some of them remembered an irrigation ditch that used to run through the neighborhood. We chose the irrigation ditch as the theme for the first art project because it represented a physical link between the neighborhood and the river.

We took a field trip to see where the irrigation ditch used to run. Then we walked to the Santa Cruz River.
The river was really dry, but in all the stories we heard, people remembered it with running water. We also looked at old maps of Barrio Anita to see where the ditch used to be. Then we wrote our own stories and drew our own pictures.