Vienna
(by Lorenzo Maldonado)
Birdhouse Coffee near 3rd St. / McKinley St.
Local musician performing on a rainy Sunday morning at a coffee shop in a historic bungalow built in 1904. The piece is composed by Justin Heinrich Knecht.
Birdhouse Coffee near 3rd St. / McKinley St.
Local musician performing on a rainy Sunday morning at a coffee shop in a historic bungalow built in 1904. The piece is composed by Justin Heinrich Knecht.
A few blocks up on Wiletta, on the other side of the I-10 canyon, is the home of George McClintock (McClintock Drive runs from the 202 in Chandler up through Tempe to the border of Scottsdale, where the name changes to Hayden Road). Down on Van Buren, there remain three buildings from Phoenix’s original high school—two halls of classrooms from 1911 and the 1929 auditorium. On the west side of 7th St. at Garfield is the 1926 Bayless Grocery Market building, now home to a couple of restaurants. It faces a pair of matching apartment buildings from the 1910s and on the same block are four more old houses, a few still occupied, all in the shadow of a massive high rise that towers above everything around it like an irradiated saguaro. Imagining its absence, one can still picture what it would have been like to walk from one of these houses over to the store to grab a Kit-Kat Bar, before meeting up with the chums behind the high school to hit the Juuls and play Pokémon Go while Mom & Dad were getting sloshed at the speakeasy underneath the Adams Hotel back in the Roaring Twenties. But those are only distant memories, the influence of those times almost completely faded and forgotten. There’s another influence that’s persisted through centuries: since this valley was a part of Mexico, the impact of Spanish-speaking communities has been necessary and apparent. This includes Mexican Americans, people of combined Indigenous and Hispanic heritage, immigrants from other Spanish-speaking countries on this side of the globe or the other, and American Citizens with any of these heritages. Drive from the Gulf of California to Downtown Phoenix; pass the Shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe on the outskirts of Puerto Peñasco; proceed through Sonoyta, Lukeville, Why, and Ajo; from Gila Bend go North, to Buckeye, or East, to Maricopa and through the Gila River Indian Community—depending on which side of town you want to enter from—in order to get around the Sierra Estrella and into the Valley of the Sun. Along the way you’ll find that—save for the obtrusive yet forgettable border wall— it’s almost impossible to tell where one country ends and the other begins. The bright blooming buganvillas, the imposing ocotillos, the adobe homes, the llaneteras and carnecerias, the colorful murals featuring characters ranging from Don Quixote to Mr. Potato Head, and Roman Catholic mission-style churches can all be spotted repeatedly throughout the journey—and all can be found in Downtown Phoenix. However, in Puerto Peñasco and Downtown Phoenix in particular, you can find the best Mexican food. As you’d expect in the Mexican coastal town it’s literally everywhere, but in Phoenix it’s always there when you’re willing to look for it. We mentioned earlier (El amor yo no sabia) the taco truck that lost its spot when an apartment building went up—Hispanic communities in Phoenix have been taken for granted and forced to relocate throughout the city’s history. The South Mountain neighborhood south of the Salt River originally developed as a community of Mexican farmers and then became a neighborhood of Hispanic and Black communities segregated from predominantly White neighborhoods by red-lining and other means. In the 1950s, the area West of the Sky Harbor was a Mexican American neighborhood called the Golden Gate Barrios, but between the ‘70s-‘90s the community was forced out via eminent domain to make more room for the airport. All that remains of the community is the lonely Sacred Heart Church, standing in a vast empty lot surrounded by warehouse offices and the airport rental car center. But there is no Phoenix, nor Arizona, without this community, and Phoenix was a central location in their fight for civil rights. At S 10th Pl. and Hadley St., tucked away in a corner of a shrinking neighborhood, is a place called Santa Rita Hall. It’s a former church building in what was another thriving Mexican American community decimated by development, and in 1969 it was the location where local community members founded Chicanos Por La Causa—an organization that has supported Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest for more than 50 years and now reaches upwards of two million people annually (their headquarters are still in this neighborhood, on Buckeye Rd.). It’s also the location where Cesar Chavez, a major leader of the Chicano movement, held a 24-day hunger strike in opposition to an Arizona state law that banned farm workers from collective action. The fight still continues for truly equitable recognition of the contribution of Spanish-speaking communities to the city, the Valley, and the whole state. Today, local entrepreneurs, Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, the Arizona Latino Arts and Culture Center at 2nd St. and Adams, and similar organizations are the standard-bearers, carrying on a legacy begun by farmers and protestors more than half a century ago. And through it all, it’s obvious how important faith is to a huge proportion of this community. Every December, the local Roman Catholic Church holds the Honra Tu Madre parade—a celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe featuring floats with bands and dancers representing each of the different parishes within the Diocese. The event culminates in Mass at St. Mary’s Basilica, the Cathedral at 3rd St. and Monroe built between 1902-1914. Members of these communities today are involved in every industry at every level throughout the city and state, and play a critical role in the broader community as they have since the foundations of the Valley of the Sun first took root. This recording is of a student from the ASU Thunderbird School of Global Management on the Downtown Campus, performing on an electric piano in a coffee shop operating out of a historic home on 3rd St. The piece is a hymn from a United Methodist Hymnal published in 1907, found by this student when the ASU music library was giving away books and other materials it had separated from its collections. The piece is attributed to Justin Heinrich Knecht and labelled simply “547: Vienna.” The bells in the background are from St. Mary’s. The coffee shop is also home to a three-legged white cat, named Ice Tré, who attracts more business in one day with his adorably cold glare than a floppy air-man brings to a car dealer on Camelback in a month.
(Some of the information in these liner notes is fictional, presented here in the attempt of satire)
(Some of the information in these liner notes is fictional, presented here in the attempt of satire)
LYRICS
N/A
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