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Jorgensen Brooks Group Counselor Sales and Marketing Everready Glass Sales Reps Mechanical Komatsu Equipment Co Resident Field Mechanic Administrative & Professional Tucson Urban League CEO/President Finance and Accounting Charles E. Gillman Company Accounting Specialist Trades/Construction RANCHO RESORT MAINTANANCE POSITION Tucson RegionOpinion by Ernesto Portillo Jr. : Guayabera has its fans — and for good reasonTucson, Arizona | Published: 07.08.2007
State Rep. Tom Prezelski is my model. It's not because he's a reliable reasonable vote in the legislature. And it's certainly not because he ties his long hair in a ponytail.
He's my model for cool clothes, specifically for the guayabera men's shirt he wears.
Prezelski, like me, loves to don guayaberas, also known as Mexican wedding shirts, during Southern Arizona's hot season. The guayabera, for the uninitiated, is Tucson's unofficial, sensible men's shirt.
They are elegant and snazzy, even if Prezelski and I are not. We don't care because we're the few and proud wearers of the guayabera, pronounced as "why-a-BEAR-a."
"While I was growing up it seemed like it was the standard professional wear," said Prezelski, 37, a Democrat representing House District 29.
The guayabera is a loose fitting short-sleeved shirt with four front pockets, although some come with two pockets. Pleats or two vertical rows of stitched embroidery, sometimes elaborate and in contrasting colors, run down the front.
Friday we had breakfast Downtown to wax poetic over the guayabera. But really we were competing.
His was periwinkle with same colored embroidery. Nice, I told him.
Mine was cream colored, with brown embroidery. Mine was nicer, he told me.
We both agreed cotton guayaberas are preferable. The polyester ones are, well, so '70s.
But it was in the 1970s when the guayabera began to gain popularity in Tucson, as I remember. They began showing up as travelers to Mexico were returning with shirts stuffed in their suitcases.
Then in 1975 the late Mayor Lew Murphy made the shirt a Tucson thing. He began issuing annual proclamations urging smart Tucson men to wear the trendsetting shirts.
Murphy asked Tucson's guayabera-loving men and the unschooled to wear the shirts every day through Labor Day.
"It amounts to cruel and unusual punishment for males to wear jackets, long-sleeve shirts and ties," said Murphy's proclamation.
For Prezelski, it's never too early to wear them. He takes out his collection of about 20 in late March and wears one daily, even while the Legislature is in session in Phoenix.
Sometimes Prezelski's uncool male co-legislators tease him. Like the time when a legislator from the opposite aisle made light of his guayabera.
Prezelski laughed. The legislator was wearing a seersucker suit.
But some of his colleagues have the fashion sense to wear guayaberas. He said one day Republican Rep. Jonathan Paton of Tucson's District 30 showed up dressed in a guayabera — identical to one Prezelski was wearing.
See. The guayabera can create bipartisan fellowship.
While some men may see the guayabera as a provincial piece of clothing or something big-city dwellers would never be caught dead wearing, Prezelski points out other practical advantages. The four pockets can store a lot.
"I can carry more business cards. You can create a filing system," he said.
In fact the guayabera, according to its lore, was made for men harvesting tropical fruits, like guayaba, which filled their pockets.
But you'll get an argument where the shirt originated. Cubans claim it as theirs. The Philippines disputes that.
Regardless of its history, the guayaberas are timeless and know no boundaries.
The guayabera, however, is not simply a comfortable shirt to wear in Tucson. Oh no. It is more than fashionable.
The guayabera makes a loud and proud cultural statement for Tucson.
"Without it," said Prezelski, "Tucson becomes as boring as other places — like Phoenix."
●Contact Ernesto Portillo Jr. at eportillo@azstarnet.com or 573-4242. His blog is http://regulus2. azstarnet.com/blogs/neto
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