(upbeat music) - This week on Arizona Illustrated, we heard the water missing home.

- You'll never understand the way we feel that this wall is total destruction.

- Quando es hoy contigo.

- Art complicates the world.

Art complicates things, and I think that's what I like, it's 'cause things are complicated.

- And the farrier.

- Every time I pick up a horse's foot, I learn something.

It's pretty much learning what I need to do better.

(upbeat music continues) - Welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

Today, we're filming at the Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block, an entire city block in historic downtown Tucson.

Now, the museum features original and traveling exhibitions and focuses on the art of Latin America, the American West, Asian, modern and contemporary art, and one of their current exhibits features an artist we'll introduce you to later in the show.

And while we're outdoors, the crew is masked up and we're keeping a safe distance from each other.

Here's an update on the Corona virus in Arizona.

- [Voice Over] Arizona's week-to-week numbers were mixed with new cases and testing positivity revealing a slight dip, but new deaths equaling off, and the Navajo nation recently reported finding no new COVID-19 related deaths over a 10 day span.

Vaccination numbers continue to improve.

This is a plan for a federally supported site potentially vaccinating 6,000 people a day in Southern Arizona, morphed into six mobile vaccination sites serving one quarter as many people.

For more on that and other coronavirus news, visit azpm.org/coronavirus.

The Trump administration erected a towering steel bollard wall across more than 450 miles of U.S.-Mexico border land.

President Biden halted that construction, but it's impact had already been felt on Quitobaquito, a rare freshwater spring and sacred indigenous site in Oregon Pipe Cactus National Monument.

That prompted a fight by tribal communities to protect and preserve the water and the way of life.

(somber music) - We all have dreams and visions, and one of the things that was told to me before wall construction, before COVID, was that there was, there was death coming.

(metal wheels clucking) (somber music continues) My name is Amber Ortega and my father is the late Melvin Ortega.

We are both members of the Tohono O'odham nation as well as descendants of Hia-Ced O'odham.

My father, he left me breadcrumbs.

I started to look through his research and it pointed me here to this whole area, and I avoided this area for years because it was haunting.

I grew up on a Tohono O'odham reservation, the fourth village from the border.

So my mother was Tohono O'odham, my father was Tohono O'odham.

My father didn't know he was Hia-Ced O'odham, and so that's where the Hia-Ced O'odham peace comes in.

(native chanting) He made a video about the Hia-Ced O'odham.

(chanting continues) - We are Hia-Ced O'odham.

There are still over 1,000 of us living in Southwestern region of Arizona and Northwestern Sonora, Mexico.

In the early 1900s, noted historians, anthropologists and archeologists claimed the Hia-Ced O'odham were extinct.

- There is a strong history of the Hia-Ced O'odham fighting for recognition, fighting for land rights.

Because of a piece of paper written by an outsider, we have been denied, the O'odham, basic human rights.

This is our Homeland, the land of the Hia-Ced O'odham.

- It's felt here.

Our people were from here.

They lived here.

They gather, they stayed in it.

It was that way for long before, and it's been erased from, from even, from even us.

The first time I ever saw Keith (inaudible) is through a video from my father.

(speaking native language) (melancholic music) - If you're a reader, and you read stories and if you hear about Oasis, you've stepped into that story because this is what it is.

It's an Oasis.

(melancholic music continues) - I am Hia-Ced O'odham, Sonora O'odham, and Tohono O'odham.

My family lived here.

My grandfather lived here.

They have orchards here but our orchard were declared into what is Mexico now.

There was no border there.

- The fence that they're putting in is trying to divide us, and yet, you can't divide family.

You can't divide culture.

- My great, great grandfather's buried there.

I have other family members that are buried there and my grandfather always told me, don't ever forget where you came from.

(car engine starting) Every time he'd bring me over here and we'd be walking around, he'd say, don't ever forget this place.

Don't forget the people here.

Don't leave your people here.

(melancholic music) - Why did, all of a sudden, when the fence started coming nearer and nearer, and you have blasting, - Fire in the hole!

(melancholic music continues) - And you have over a hundred, I don't know how many trucks, go through here.

Heavy, heavy trucks.

And then, they have to dig every five miles to pull water out so they can do their cement.

They're telling us it has no effect whatsoever, but why in the short period of time when they started from that hill, did this happen here?

(melancholic music continues) - One of the things they didn't acknowledge is the generational pain that it kicked up.

The generational trauma.

We've lived it, and as indigenous people, we're continuously living it.

- We are the bulldozed and violated land as well.

We are the cactus displaced far from its home.

We are the turtle that has come out of the shell to face.

We are the water missing home.

(melancholic music continues) - America, let me divide your families, let me get an iron blade and drag it across your heart, and maybe then will you only understand what we feel and what we see here today.

- So we spend the rest of the hour in Arizona looking at how O'odham land and water defenders are leading a campaign against the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall near a sacred spring inside the Oregon Pipe National Monument.

(wind swooshing) (somber music) - [Protester] We don't want anyone to get hurt.

(protester wailing) (indistinct chatter) - You'll never understand the way we feel, that this wall is total destruction to mankind.

(somber music continues) - On September 9th of 2020, construction was reaching the spring.

My heart was pounding and I saw that they were attempting to cut through the land.

- No more.

- No more!

- No more!

No more!

- And we couldn't have them do that.

(native singing) I stood there singing.

That's all I could do is sing as they yelled and they encroached.

I did not give you permission.

No.

And that's how I got arrested.

(wind swooshing) (native speaking) (wind swooshing) - Accountability was a goal and I knew that there will be consequences, and whether the charges be dismissed or not, it does feel good to say that for that day, we were able to hold them accountable and stop construction.

That day we're able to stop the desecration of our sacred site.

That day, we were able to utilize our voices and speak up against imperialism, and against authority, against greed, against power.

That day we were able to be Hia-Ced O'odham and it felt so good.

(melancholic music) It felt so good.

(melancholic music continues) - There are over 1,000 Hia-Ced, and we would like to tell you that we are alive and working to establish a community made up of our Aboriginal territory.

So we as Hia-Ced O'odham can finally become full participants in our rights as part of the Tohono O'odham nation.

(native singing) - We are Hia-Ced O'odham.

- Artist Karlito Espinoso likes to think of his paintings as visual essays, a way to explore the politics of a place.

His work has been exhibited by esteemed institutions around the world, including the Newark Museum, El Museo Barrio in Harlem, United Nations World Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Street Art Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Following a very successful MFA show at the U of A in 2018, he was accepted into the prestigious independent study program at the Whitney Museum of Art.

Producer Andrew Brown spent some time with him as he worked on new pieces and explored the borderlands.

(calm classical music) - I most like to think of painting as, I paint in hopes that this type of painting will become obsolete.

I'm just pulling together things that are part of the Visual Candida painting history and letting them, kind of, say what they actually did and not just, you know, look how they appeared, and letting them, like, reveal their own contradations.

These are all the deaths since 2000 at the border, and then this, kind of, piñata capital font text, then you have St. Michael by Giordano, and then a Caravaggio's Narcissus, kind of looking at your own reflection or your own doing.

It's really easy to, kind of, get caught up and to think that, you know, like, Oh, we just got to get rid of Trump, because then, migrants will be happy again, and you know, it might not always be a happy thing, but the thing is like, these institutions are bigger than these individuals.

It's all interconnected, and that's why I'm trying to connect these things.

(classical music continues) Art complicates the world.

I think art complicates things, and I think that's what I like.

It is because things are complicated.

I was born in Costa Rica, but my mom is American.

She was born in New York, but she, her dad's Colombian, and then my dad's Costa Rican, and then I, we lived in Venezuela and then he moved to U.S. when I was 12.

So there's never quite any like, like an isolated identity.

We were talking about, you know, the colonial oil paintings.

These are more like how material can make things move, change, or reveal information or talk about history in a way that is not so linear.

It's made with wood stain, and I, like, stained the whole thing until it was black, and then, like, I rubbed the stain off and then the title reappeared, and the title is The Reinitiation of the Struggle, and I think there's so much space for this kind of work and it's really exciting.

This is a portrait of somebody, kind of, elongated.

A young man who is part of the labor organizer movement.

You can only see the disappeared through mobilization.

This is the first iteration of, kind of, an idea that played on mobilization and made people move.

So you have to move to get, and there's never a point where you get all the information, you know, but there's, the more you move, you kind of compile that information.

Border deaths and disappearances is not, like, an isolated historical phenomenon.

You know, there's a history of disappearance in the border in Mexico, North Mexico and South Arizona, just in this area.

So, you know, you have this young man from the 60s who participated in labor organizing, probably with the mines near the border who has disappeared.

And then you have a young man who, maybe, five years ago disappeared crossing the border for economic reasons.

So you have history repeating itself in the same place, you know, with the same, these are made from the earth from the same place.

They almost reflect each other even in their pose and their gaze and in their absence.

(cars driving at distance) (machine whirring) The mural on Speedway reminds me more of, like, my practice in the studio.

(calming piano music) With this wall, I'm really thinking about the floor plans of a place, kind of like, the blueprints of a place, not necessarily, like, a linear narrative, but I like to think of it like that as a visual, a visual essay of place.

(piano music continues) I'm a very messy painter.

There's something really beautiful about, like, the chaos of mixing on on the wall itself and on the spot, how that can only exist in that moment that I mixed it and there's nothing else.

The mess that I make, the three primary colors and the end result, there's something really nice about how, like, out of so little, everything else comes out.

- I had heard about him a little bit through the grapevine, but just that, there was an interesting new artist who already had a reputation as a muralist in New York and around the country.

But I've been going to MFA shows at the University of Arizona since I first came in 1995.

So I always loved to scout to meet new artists.

I'm usually very methodical about making any acquisitions and usually very tentative when it comes to actually purchasing a piece, and when I saw this piece, I acted extremely spontaneously for myself.

I literally went up to the curator and said put this on hold right now.

I want to be sure we get this piece.

It brought me to tears.

There was something so moving about the piece .

You are brought in by the beauty of the reproduction of the Caravaggio.

But the fact that he was addressing an issue of the idea of the government silencing or manipulating issues of immigration, it has served their own purposes.

I mean, he's not afraid to take on topics head on.

I think it's important to have his work here because it really fills a niche.

No one's painting like him.

No one's addressing these themes in the same way.

(indistinct radio chatter) - Just going out is the first step of researching, for real researching, for your practice.

(indistinct radio chatter) - It's so important to actually travel to the places that you're doing work about.

I work at an environmental science lab at the U of A and we do environmental sampling, neighboring mines.

Karlito is my partner and husband and we met in the MFA program together.

He's from New York and I'm from the Midwest Nebraska.

- You got to wave.

- Oh yeah.

- You got to wave.

- You got to wave because we don't want to look like you.

- Don't belong here?

(chuckles) - Yeah.

It's as simple as a wave.

(somber music) It's so nice just to have a moment where you just go and just be in place.

There is that tension that you can see, and I see that with mines, and I see that with migration, and they're so closely tied in Arizona.

They're at the same locations, there's the same landscape, these open pit mines, exploited labor and also enforcement on migration.

The border, I begin to see it less as a place, but as, like, a method that is replicated as you just move around the entire world.

- Art is, it's a way that you can visualize science and data.

It's a way that people can develop this more embodied understanding.

- And it's not necessarily about just, like, saving the world or fixing something, but it's trying to better understand how things are actually a lot more interconnected.

(classical music continues) From my work, what it's really about is just about how we're more similar than we're different.

Going out, you start to realize that we are all part of a shared history.

(classical music continues) - A painting by Karlito Espinosa is currently included in the Contemporary Latin American art exhibit at the Tucson Museum of Art until September 26th.

Arizona has been, and continues to be horse country.

Ask any horse owner and they'll tell you at any given time, the health of a horse may depend on the health of its hooves.

Next, we meet a Tucson man who plays an important role in horse health, by managing and protecting their hooves.

Here is the farrier.

(horse galloping slowly) - Nice to sweat a little bit.

(machine whirring) - I've never actually punched a clock in my life.

I've never had to go into an office building to go to work, and I feel very fortunate to do that.

And as cliche as it may sound, I am not working when I'm working.

My name is Tyson Clark and I'm a farrier.

(pliers cutting) (hooves breaking) A farrier is a blacksmith that works on horses' feet.

I'm a third generation farrier.

I was 12 when I started to working on horses.

I've driven teams of horses.

I've started horses as babies on up to ride, but I've always been around the farrier industry because of my dad.

(horse whinnies) When I was about 24, something clicked, the foot just seemed different to me, the whole lower limb of the horse seemed different to me and I wanted to be more accountable for the things I was doing to their feet.

I just didn't want to be an average horseshoer.

You've got three different personalities to start with.

You have my personality, the horse's personality, and the owner of the horse's personality to deal with, and that can be a challenge.

This is one of those jobs that in a split second, you could be done.

Something could happen and you can never do it again so we always have to think about our safety.

It's great when I happen to make it to the horse shows, and you have a client that has a problem, a horse who might have some problem, the feet on their horse and you've done all you can to help them get to the horse show and you see that smile on their face when they leave the ring, that's pretty special.

All these horses have personalities.

Every horse I work on has their own personality and I'm fortunate enough to get to have a pretty loyal clientele, so a lot of horses I've been shoeing them since they were young.

(machine whirring) I put the first shoes they've ever worn on them, and they're 10 years old now and they'd never seen anybody else but me.

(metal clanging) It's pretty neat to be able to just be, kind of, part of their lives.

There's times where I'm gone, just traveling, trying to get better, trying to get better and seeing how other people shoe horses, how other people shod your sarge horses or jumping horses or Western horses, and I'm just trying to fix my flaws.

In the last year, I've won about 10 buckles, you know, I've won 10 different competitions.

I've won the best shod foot at the competitions are what you want to win.

You know, if you can win the best shod foot then you, I mean, that's why we're there.

(horse hoof scratching) Every time I pick up a horse's foot, I learn something.

It's pretty much learning what I need to do better.

I don't know if there is anything I'd rather be doing.

I mean, there's certain things I'd rather be doing for a couple hours, you know, I'm a big hunter because I like the outdoors.

I'm a big outdoors man.

There you have it.

I'm really real fortunate that I do get to wake up every day and it isn't going to work.

It's not going to work.

I can't think of anything else I would be doing.

- Watch Arizona Illustrated stories on demand on our website azpm.org/ArizonaIllustrated.

Catch up on past episodes, rewatch your favorites, or even view some stories before they broadcast, and follow us on Facebook to receive stories right to your phone several times a week.

Here is a sneak peek at next week's Arizona Illustrated.

(country music) - Well, there's no traffic.

(laughing) There's no traffic and it's peaceful out here.

A lot of fresh air.

There's times it's hectic because, you know, you have your schedule set up, and first thing you know, something breaks down and you got to work through that, but that's normal.

That's normal human life.

(chimes chiming) - We get to enjoy the smells of nature.

We don't have city smog.

We don't deal with any of that.

So much so that, when you're on the farm and then you go to town and you see everyone with the masks and, oh yes, there is something else going on in life.

- You forget your mask, you know, you forget about the, Oh yes I got to have a mask here, you know.

(chuckles) - You just don't think about those kinds of things as much.

- I just love working with nature, working with animals, and working with the soil.

(upbeat music) - Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, we'll see you next week.

(country music continues) (exciting orchestra music)