Arizona and New Mexico
If you scroll down below the images, I will be adding notes about particular locations as I have time. Please enjoy the images, and email me if you have any questions.
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NOTES:
Ruben Licano’s Shrine to the Virgin Mary – It’s a sad irony that I was writing about this in the second week of May, 2019, because I discovered that Ruben Licano passed away just a few weeks earlier at the age of 83, on Sunday, April 28, 2019. I wonder if his family or other people in the local Hispanic community will take over maintenance of the shrine. I hope so. I also read that there was controversy about this privately built and maintained Catholic shrine on State land. The Arizona Department of Transportation responded by transferring ownership to a private landowner. Good for them. The following is exerted from my 2004 travel journal from Saturday, May 29.
“On my way out of Miami (Arizona) on Highway 60 heading southwest, I passed an elaborate roadside shrine. It is about 14 feet square, all stone construction, with a Roman-arched roof. Spanning the front opening are a set of very ornate iron gates painted red, and they were open. Out in front are two manicured hedges in the shape of upside-down bells, plus several shade trees with the trunks painted white. Facing the shrine are two heavy cast iron benches. In front of the shrine, several tourists were talking to a man in camouflage military fatigues.
I turned my eyes back to the road and kept driving. A mile further I pulled over and stopped. Fortunately, better sense overpowered the road imperative. I didn’t really even think about it other than to scold myself for not stopping as soon as I saw the shrine. I turned around and drove back. The tourists left as I arrived, but the other man in military dress remained, standing by the shrine as if on duty. A beautifully tricked out, well-maintained vintage pickup was parked nearby – the kind that older blue-collar guys often own. This was a mid-70s Ford 3/4 ton with lots of extra chrome accessories – sun visor, running lights, fog lights (I doubt they’ve ever had fog in Miami, AZ), tinted windows, etc. The body was freshly waxed and polished, and you could see your reflection in the surface. I walked up to the man and commented on the spiffy pickup truck and the beauty of the shrine. He swelled with pride, and even more when I asked who built the shrine. He replied “I built it in 1977. I’ve been taking care of it ever since.”
We introduced ourselves and shook hands. His name is Ruben Cota Licano. He takes great pride in the shrine, and rightfully so. I shot a series of photos, and then asked Ruben what inspired him to build the shrine. His whole demeanor changed slightly as he shifted into a narration that still brings considerable pain. Ruben is a Korean War veteran, and during combat was trapped in a foxhole with his best friend. Early in the skirmish his friend was shot in the head, and despite Ruben’s best efforts, died in his arms. For five days Ruben stayed in the fox hole with his buddy’s corpse. The whole area was filled with a straggling of Chinese and American infantry, taking potshots at each other, exhausted and starving but still willing to kill. Reuben did not expect to survive. He talked to his dead comrade, and after several days prayed aloud to Jesus, promising that if he survived, he would build a shrine to the Virgin Mary.
Ruben did survive the battle and the war, but distractions of his youth and early adulthood delayed fulfillment of his promise. It was not until 1977 when he was 41 years old that he finally built the shrine, 24 years after the war ended. Over the years the site has been vandalized repeatedly. The current Virgin is solid concrete, while the previous two had been hollow plaster or ceramic and were easily damaged, especially by the occasional gunshot. Each time vandalism occurs, Ruben prays for the perpetrators and painstakingly restores the shrine to its full splendor. He regularly stocks new candles, cleans up the spilled wax, trims the shrubbery, and does other maintenance.
I took a series of photos, including one with Ruben standing in front, looking proud. He needed to leave, but encouraged me to light several candles. As he drove away, I got matches from my kitchen kit and lit two candles. The shrine is filled with an extensive array of small icons, charms, ornamental candles, and framed photographs of loved ones and ancestors of Hispanics from the community who frequent Ruben’s shrine. (End of travel journal exert.)
The Great Unconformity – The Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon was discovered in 1869 by one-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell on his pioneering float trip down the Canyon. The Unconformity can be seen throughout the canyon, and is clearly visible because of the steeply tilted rock beds cut off horizontally, overlain by perfectly level horizontal beds. Angular unconformities are not uncommon in geology, and are often visible in road cuts and other exposed rock faces, but the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon is among the granddaddies of all unconformities. It represents an enormous gap in geologic time, as explained in the following article from Wikipedia.
“The Great Unconformity of Powell in the Grand Canyon is a regional unconformity that separates the Tonto Group from the underlying, faulted and tilted sedimentary rocks of the Grand Canyon Supergroup and vertically foliated metamorphic and igneous rocks of the Vishnu Basement Rocks. The unconformity between the Tonto Group and the Vishnu Basement Rocks is a nonconformity. The break between the Tonto Group and the Grand Canyon Supergroup is an angular unconformity.
Powell’s Great Unconformity is part of a continent-wide unconformity that extends across Laurentia, the ancient core of North America. It marks the progressive submergence of this landmass by a shallow cratonic sea and its burial by shallow marine sediments of the Cambrian-Early Ordovician Sauk sequence. The submergence of Laurentia ended a lengthy period of widespread continental denudation that exhumed and deeply eroded Precambrian rocks and exposed them to extensive physical and chemical weathering at the Earth’s surface. As a result, Powell’s Great Unconformity is unusual in its geographic extent and its stratigraphic significance.
The length of time represented by Powell’s Great Unconformity varies along its length. Within the Grand Canyon, the Great Unconformity represents a period of about 175 million years between the Tonto Group and the youngest subdivision, the Sixtymile Formation, of the Grand Canyon Supergroup. At the base of the Grand Canyon Supergroup, where it truncates the Bass Formation, the period of time represented by this angular unconformity increases to about 725 million years. Where the Tonto Group overlies the Vishnu Basement Rocks, the Great Unconformity represents a period as much as 1.2 to 1.6 billion years of time. (End of Wikipedia article.)