If you feel forgotten, El Tiradito remembers
"The Wishing Shrine," which got a historical marker in 1988, is a spiritual center for people cast out by "polite" society.
With the current social and political zeitgeist screaming that You Don't Matter, there is, and always will be, one place saying that you do.
El Tiradito in Tucson, Arizona, is the only U.S. historical site explicitly dedicated to what its historical marker calls "the soul of a sinner buried in unconsecrated ground," and as such is a shrine and a holy place for everyone greater society considers unholy.
The historical marker at El Tiradito, placed in 1988 by the Tucson Historical Committee and Arizona Historical Society. There are English and Spanish versions of the marker.
El Tiradito is known as The Wishing Shrine. If you come to El Tiradito, located a block from the rear of the Tucson Convention Center, you'll see votive candles, notes shoved into cracks in the crumbling adobe facade, and messages written directly onto the shrine. There are legends about how if the candle you light if you make your wish stays lit all night, your wish will come true. But the collective power of El Tiradito is as a gathering place for people who cast to the margins.
El Tiradito actually means "The Little Castaway," a reference to Juan Oliveras, the sinner at the center of its backstory. Various versions of his story exist (this one is particularly melodramatic and gruesome), but the gist is that he was an 18-year-old ranch-hand in the 1870s who had an affair with his mother-in-law, was hacked to death by his father-in-law when he caught them in the act, and was buried where he was killed when the in the spot he died because the Catholic Church wouldn't take him in its cemetery because of his adultery.
As Juan was cast away, so too have other castaways – well beyond what the marker notes as El Tiradito's hold on "Mexican lore and culture" – made the site a spiritual home. It was a gathering place for people to mourn the February 2024 death of Oklahoma nonbinary teen Nex Benedict after being beaten at school.
It's little solace that a place like El Tiradito exists – that it even has to exist. But I hope, if you're feeling down and left out, you can virtually draw on its power: the power of knowing that people you don't even know care about you. That no matter how much the powers that be want to marginalize you, you are here, and you are not alone.
Messages written onto the El Tiradito shrine, Tucson, Arizona.