The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, hear stories of migrants in limbo in Sonora, Mexico, as U.S.

asylum is suspended.

(Karla) Nos convertimos en los que estamos dando el asilo en estos momentos.

Ya no somos un cruce.

Tenemos que adaptarnos en todos los aspectos.

(Tom) One artist is capturing changes in the Sea of Cortez through painting and photography.

(David) I try to make my work digestible to whoever, you know, people that know art and people that don't know art.

(Tom) Recognizing the person behind the statistics of femicide.

(Vanessa) I'm a woman as well, and it's just really sad and scary to go out and people telling you to take care of yourself because something can happen to you.

And then, you know, if something happens to you, they could blame you for it.

I don't know.

It's just like you put yourself in the shoes, you know, as a woman.

(Tom) And visit a shrine dedicated to a sinner.

(Jaynie) I think that this is a really great site to talk about folk Catholicism and kind of regionally specific expressions of organized religion.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

You know, for decades, people from all around the world fleeing violence and persecution have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border asking for asylum, something that's been protected under international treaty and domestic law for those who qualify.

When President Trump was elected, critics say he changed that process and left many, many people in limbo.

Por el lado humano, pues yo creo que esto es lo peor que se ha estado desde el punto de vista humanitario, nosotros entendemos, y no nos mezclamos en política, y respetamos mucho las decisiones del gobierno norteamericano.

Estemos de acuerdo o no, no es nuestro papel, no?

Pero sí vemos cómo, pues, una sensación de esperanza en las personas.

Mi nombre es Ricardo Aaron Flores Morales.

Soy técnico en urgencias médicas; trabajo en Centro Esperanza como co-director.

Mi nombre es Karla Betancourt, y soy co-director de Centro de Esperanza, junto con mi compañero.

Centro de Esperanza es un lugar que se dedica a la atención a migrantes en todos los aspectos: dormitorios, alimentos, suministros básicos.

Cuando nosotros llegamos aquí hace tres años, era cuando estaba el COVID.

Entonces se supone que las fronteras estaban cerradas a cualquier tipo de asilo, pero aún así había abogados que tomaban casos como por excepción, y sucedía el asilo para personas.

Nosotros vivimos el cambio de cuando se terminó.

Entonces vino CBP One.

Pues se cierra CBP One cuando muchísimas personas ya tenían esperando ocho o nueve meses por una cita.

Y venía con la familia de mi esposo.

Éramos, en total, éramos 16.

Venían mis suegros, mis cuñadas, concuños.

Todos venimos huyendo de la violencia.

Y un cuñado mío lo habían secuestrado, y venía con su piernita quebrada.

Entonces, por eso se entregaron ellos antes que yo.

Yo vengo con mi papá enfermo, así que yo decidí, pues, esperar.

Inicié mi nuevo proceso e hice otro registro.

Me salió mi cita.

Me sentí súper feliz, pero entró el nuevo presidente y ya faltaban cuatro días para irme cuando me llegó un correo donde dice que mi cita era cancelada.

Ya se imaginará.

Pues me sentí mal.

Mal.

¿Por qué?

Porque ya llevaba casi un año de espera y para que mi cita se me cancelara—y pues yo, la verdad, no me he ido de este lugar porque no tengo a dónde más ir.

Nos convertimos en los que estamos dando el asilo en estos momentos.

Ya no somos un cruce.

Tenemos que adaptarnos en todos los aspectos.

Por ejemplo, antes los niños no iban a la escuela porque solamente eran tres o cuatro meses.

Pero como ahora están aquí permanentemente hemos tenido que echar mano, por ejemplo, de atención psicológica para niños, para mamás y pues adaptarnos en todos los aspectos, porque la idea es apoyar a estas personas a que se queden aquí el tiempo que ellos necesiten para que hagan lo que sea que ellos quieran hacer.

Por tierra, por de país en país: de Colombia, la selva; la selva, Panamá; Panamá, Costa Rica; Costa Rica, Nicaragua; de Nicaragua, Honduras; de Honduras a Guatemala, y de Guatemala, México.

Llegamos a Ciudad de México.

Que fue cuando fueron las votaciones del presidente Maduro en Venezuela, que él se volvió a reelegir a ganar.

Vivimos la experiencia del tren de la Bestia para llegar hasta acá.

Duramos diez días.

En Sinaloa nos tuvieron en una casa tres días y nos estaban pidiendo dinero, pero no, no tenemos.

Y así no tenemos familiares así que nos envíen por la situación del país, así ya lo último nos dejaron ir y nos montaron en otro tren ellos mismos.

Pudimos avanzar.

Seguimos metiendo nuestra cita, pero no, nunca llegó.

Hasta el 20 de enero que no (ininteligible) aplicar más.

Y de ahí pues hemos permanecido aquí día y noche.

Y pues no perder la fe ni la esperanza.

la esperanza que ellos tienen es que este ciclo pues se termine y ahora es cuestión de saber cuándo se va a terminar.

Ahora, quienes están aquí no tienen otra opción, no pueden volver a donde ellos son.

Hay muchos que no son mexicanos y es muy difícil su regreso, tanto como fue difícil para ellos llegar aquí.

ha sido muy difícil, porque nunca hemos estado tan lejos de nuestro país.

De nuestra familia.

Pero bueno, que todo sea por un buen futuro para ellos.

Pues me imagino que voy a estar allá con, pues, con mi familia, más que nada.

Porque en realidad la familia pues si nos hace falta muchísimo, y pues me imagino estar allá con ellos, contentos, este pues, trabajando, saliendo adelante, todos como una bonita familia.

Y entonces pues sí queremos llegar y es como todo en momentos que estamos desesperados, lloramos y todo porque sentimos que no llegamos.

Personas comunes y corrientes que solo desean ir, luchar por un sueño y progresar.

Que a final de cuentas es la esencia pura de Estados Unidos.

Vivir por un sueño, luchar por un sueño, y progresar basado en ese sueño.

The Sea of Cortez tucked between Baja California and mainland Mexico is often referred to as the Aquarium of the World.

It's home to incredible marine life and breathtaking beauty.

And it's where diver, painter, and underwater photographer David Andres found his life's passion.

(soft music) (David) This always been about beauty.

I know that's probably not a great term to use, but I think it's part of what a painting is.

I want them to know that there's more than just the beauty.

Doing landscape to whatever I'm doing, whether it's underwater or looking at satellite images, they all have something to do with the world we live in and the environment.

(Dan) He is not a traditional landscape artist.

He invents what he puts on the canvas by various methods that are unique to him.

(David) My grandmother, she died when I was eight years old, but on my seventh birthday, she gave me a set of watercolors, set me down, showed me how to basically use them.

That was the start of my love of painting.

Micah's been my go-to to look like water.

Tried to start out in architecture, but got strayed as my father would have said.

(Rafael) When he was mentioning what he had been doing for years, in photographing the beautiful aquarium of the world that the Sea of Cortez sees, he also encountered the problematic of the nets that fisheries are using as a way to promote consciousness in how important it is to take care of our oceans, we thought, we need to do this together.

(David) The Sea of Cortez is very important to me.

It's been part of my life.

I would spend a lot of time underwater investigating and noticing from the eighties to the nineties, the destruction of the ocean was happening right in front of our eyes.

I did some research and found out Mexican government because of their shortfalls in economy, had left South Korean mill ships come into the Sea of Cortez.

We started seeing breakups of gill nets floating on the surface, fishing nets, over dredging for shrimp.

And I had time to figure out what was going on and started using it in my artwork to investigate.

(Rafael) That was particularly important for me to bring this activity to the consulate in a way to say that we are concerned in preserving this beautiful environment.

We were able to project through art, this pride that we have in the Sea of Cortez, but also the concerns in how important it is when we consume seafood to know that this seafood is being captured without practices that damage the environment.

So I think it's trying to connect all the dots.

(David) I try to make my work digestible to whoever, people that know art and people that don't know art.

(Dan) It has a quality of light that emanates from the work.

You can see what I'm talking about here.

Someone would perhaps just see this as an abstraction.

It is an abstraction, but it's not just an abstraction.

It has the reality of forms, colors, a certain movement.

(David) And I had done an investigation about water issues from all the way from graduate school.

Investigating glacier meltings and bleaching of corals.

And I came back to Tucson and used my home facility to invent paintings that related to those themes.

And I'm still doing it.

Femicide is the final brutal breath of a lifelong violence that some women know all too well.

Next, we meet an artist who collects objects, memories, and love to honor femicide victims.

Her work speaks gently, but urgently, reminding us that behind every statistic is a life we cannot afford to lose.

♪ SOFT PIANO (Vanessa) If you tell anyone in Mexico you're an artist, they're gonna be like, "Okay."

[ LAUGHS ] My mom always supported me.

My dad didn't object.

[ LAUGHS ] I mostly work with oil painting, acrylic painting, chalk pastels.

I recently started to work with insulation.

♪ SOFT PIANO ♪ In my paintings I mostly work with themes of like that are socio-political, like femicides, the border, and its issues surrounding it.

Sometimes I work with like analyzing myself and things like that.

♪ SOFT VIOLIN The definition of femicide is the killing of a woman because of her gender.

The biggest problem in any country that lets this happen is impunity.

Violence against women is a global health problem.

I started to talk about it cause I feel like that's the power of the artist is to show your personal perspective about anything.

♪ SOFT VIOLIN I used that license of being a Mexican woman to talk about this problem and even going even into more specific.

In 2020, I was listening to the news and I listened about the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla, a 25-year-old woman.

That was very shocking for Mexico, for the whole nation.

And then days later they find Fátima Cecilia, a little seven-year-old girl in a garbage bag.

That moment I had the idea of this painting.

♪ SOMBER VIOLIN As women, we were not safe.

We were not being told you're gonna be okay.

It was the opposite, like stop complaining or blaming the victims.

A lot of social indifference and that all turned into a lot of emotions within me, a lot of anger.

And of course I wasn't the only one.

There were huge protests happening in Mexico and that's when the pandemic started.

And I thought of making my own protest at home through art so I could share it online because that's where almost everyone was living.

The name of my thesis is "En memoria digna," "Indignifying Memory."

It's intended to be a memorial for them, a very respectful memorial.

And I started to want to add to the humanizing narrative of femicides.

♪ SOFT PIANO I'm a woman as well and it's just really sad and scary to go out and people telling you to take care of yourself because something can happen to you.

And then you know if something happens to you, they could blame you for it.

I don't know, it's just like you put yourself in the shoes you know as a woman.

I am just empathizing and it's my reality as well.

It could happen to anyone I know.

So that's mostly why I do it.

This installation that you see here, it's a small part of my thesis.

My thesis is originally seven by seven feet.

It's a representation of an Ana Paola Jaramillo, women victim of femicide from Nogales Sonora.

My thesis consisted of speaking to two families of women victims of femicide.

I contacted Ana Paola's family.

She was just a 13 year old child.

She was such a ray of sunshine.

She was, she loved to dance.

She loved her family, her pet.

She loved her friends.

She had so many friends.

So I started to look at specific victims, women victims because the media just like turns them into numbers.

All statistics, that they uh one out of 10, one out of 10.

But she's, she was the whole world for her family.

These families are indirect victims of femicide as well.

The pain that they have after that is just out of this world.

Honestly, I don't know how to even describe it or understand it even.

I'm not attacking anyone or asking for answers or investigating.

I'm not doing any of that here.

And I don't want it to be misinterpreted to that ever.

It's just about them, you know, and for the families and for them.

I hope that other women artists also chime in and make work about specific women victims of femicide.

There are so many artists.

There are so many women victims.

It would be a way of helping these families heal.

♪ SOFT VIOLIN In the heart of downtown Tucson, sits a small shrine with a big story.

El Tiradito is the only Catholic shrine in the United States dedicated to a sinner born of a tale of forbidden love in the late 1800s.

Well, today candles still flicker there as visitors leave notes, prayers, and hopes keeping the community memory alive.

♪ RISING SYNTHS (Jaynie) The physical space that we're standing in is a pocket park with a Catholic shrine.

But the site has an interesting kind of story associated with it.

♪ SOFT GUITAR El Tiradito or the wishing shrine has the only Catholic shrine on unconsecrated ground that's dedicated to a sinner.

El Tiradito means cast away.

[ TRAFFIC NOISES ] Legend has it that if you come to the shrine with a pure heart and an open mind and you make your request, it will be fulfilled.

♪ SOFT GUITAR I think legend is a good way to phrase it because the legend of the site and the history of this site are kind of different things.

But it starts in the late 1800s and there's a young man, and he is married and he falls in love with his mother-in-law.

And there is a duel that happens between the young man and his father-in-law, and he's killed.

And he is kind of left to die in this spot.

But community members kind of knew that their love was pure and honest.

Maybe not socially appropriate, but definitely true.

And so they kind of built the shrine.

But the history of this site is a little bit different.

The original wishing shrine was actually somewhere else.

So this is a reconstruction.

So what's interesting about this site, is it exists at kind of the crossroads between those things.

I think that this is a really great site to talk about folk Catholicism and kind of regionally specific expressions of organized religion.

It feels very much like if you go to the chapel at a cathedral, you kind of step into the space, and there's a place for you to place your offering.

If it's a candle, if it's a photograph, if it's a milagro, or some other little trinket that's kind of associated with the story that you're trying to tell.

So you'll see kind of things left behind.

♪ SOFT GUITAR The site itself is associated with the prevention of the construction of a freeway.

But the community in an effort to prevent that freeway kind of cutting through their neighborhood, they work together to have this site listed on the National Register of Historic Places and it continues to be as a culturally significant site to Tucson.

♪ SOFT GUITAR It's an amazing story about everyday community members who kind of come together and say, 'okay, the systems that be don't speak the language that we speak.

So how about we use bureaucracy to our benefit to kind of establish a protected place?'

[ WIND NOISES ] This place means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

It's a place where we come together to ask for forgiveness or to pray or to ask for a miracle.

And it's a place where we can all do that together.

And how can we use that to kind of inform future generations that these spaces matter?

♪ SOFT GUITAR FADES In May of this year, the beloved PBS program Antiques Roadshow will return to Tucson.

And we're one of only three stops to mark their 31st season.

So up next, we open the vault for a look at their last visit here back in 2015.

It's early on a warm Saturday morning and people have come from all over Southern Arizona to have their items appraised and maybe just maybe appear on the show.

I love the show.

And so it's like, this is fun.

I made up my mind one of these days, one of these years to get on your show and hopefully get in the appraisal.

We put in for the lottery for the tickets, singing "What the Heck?"

And we got two golden tickets.

I got the pretty gold one here.

The thought that maybe you had something that's really valuable that might be a change in life.

It's part of my religion, watching your show every week.

When you receive a ticket, there's an entry time, anytime between eight and five.

And you're told to come, not more than a half an hour before.

Back in the day, when we first started, it was like you were waiting outside for a concert ticket.

People would line up the night before.

We find that people that come, they enjoy being in line with other people and making friends, sharing stories, talking about their items.

I think my dad got this in Gettysburg.

So I don't know if it's used in the Civil War, but it was used in the Revolution or somewhere between.

People have the opportunity to bring us two objects and they tend to pick the most two treasured things in their home.

And the best advice I always have is pick something you can't Google.

I think it's called a mixed media.

And after that, I don't know what they call it.

That's what I'm hoping to find out today.

I found a couple of option listings for oil paintings, but they were nowhere near like this.

And then that's it.

That's where it all petered out.

I have a very unusual cannon.

It's from 1920.

It shoots, what do you call those little balls?

Cannon balls, little tiny cannon balls.

So I'm excited.

I don't know anything about it.

I know this after producing this show all these years, great objects are rare.

That is the tricky thing.

Most of what we see will be worth less than, I'm gonna be generous, $500.

Do you care to unveil for us what you have here?

Yeah.

Do you know anything about it?

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

That's what we're here to find out today.

This could be a wild card.

It really could be.

We're excited though.

Yeah.

It's beautiful and it feels like it has vintage behind it.

We think so.

This is, that looks serious.

It is.

Is there a train or a boat missing its lights today?

They are heavy, wow.

What do you know about them so far?

We don't really know much.

They're very complete.

They're in pretty good condition.

Are you here just to fiddle around today or is this serious business?

No, just fiddling around.

Just fun.

Have you seen the name Stradivarius printed anywhere?

Unfortunately, it's not a Stradivarius.

Not looking for the million dollar ticket, but if it's here, that'll be nice too.

Again, the show will be back filming in Tucson on May 19th, 2026.

And they've made some changes to their production you'll want to know about.

So please visit azpm.org/roadshow for more information and to find out how you can win tickets to this year's filming.

Thank you for joining us from here at Enchanted Hills Trails Park, a great place to take a nice walk.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again soon.