What it’s actually like
Brown Avenue is the block that earns Old Town its slogan — false fronts, wooden sidewalks in places, hitching posts nobody uses — and Mexican Imports has been on it since the mid-1950s, which means it has been here roughly as long as the false fronts themselves. Most of the Western storefronts around it have cycled through a dozen tenants. This one has been selling the same thing since Eisenhower.
The thing is color. Step in and the shop is stacked floor to ceiling with Talavera in cobalt and yellow, punched-tin mirrors catching the light, racks of blown glass with the telltale bubbles, painted Oaxacan animals, papel picado, skeletons in every occupation, tile by the box. It is crowded in the way real import shops are crowded, because the goods come up by the truckload and the storefront was built for a 1950s inventory. You will bump into things. That is part of it.
It is also cheap, in the honest sense. Nothing here has been marked up to boutique prices because a designer put it on a white shelf. The Talavera costs what Talavera costs, and the tin lantern that would be a decor item on the Camelback Corridor is just a tin lantern here.
What to buy
Talavera. The hand-painted tin-glazed pottery of Puebla — platters, serving pieces, planters, house-number tiles, whole sinks. A set of tiles is the best souvenir on Brown Avenue; a large platter is the one that survives the flight if you carry it on.
Punched tin. Mirrors, star lanterns, nichos and ornaments — the metalwork that has furnished Valley patios for seventy years. It is light, it packs flat-ish, and it looks right in the desert light.
Blown glass. The classic blue-rimmed tumblers and pitchers with the bubbles in them. Buy the set; you will break one.
Folk art. Oaxacan alebrijes, Day of the Dead figures, milagros and retablos. Look in the back and up high, where the interesting pieces hide behind the postcards.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The shop sits in the middle of the Old Town walking district, so park once — the free public lots and garages around the Civic Center and Brown Avenue are the move — and make it a stop on the loop from the Old Adobe Mission north along Brown to Main Street. Weekday mornings in the cool season are the quiet time to actually see the shelves; weekend afternoons in spring are a slow shuffle through tight aisles. Summer is empty and a fine time to fill a box.
Carrying is the practical problem. Talavera is heavy and glass is glass; bring a bag with structure, or plan the shop as the last stop before the car.
Eat while you’re there
Los Olivos is a block away on 2nd Street and has been serving Old Town since 1947 — the two are the district’s oldest Mexican-rooted businesses, and lunch at one after shopping the other is the most coherent hour in downtown. The Mission is right here on Brown Avenue beside the church for a modern-Latin dinner. The Rusty Spur Saloon around the corner on Main Street handles the beer.
How it got here
The 1950s were the decade Scottsdale decided what it was going to be. The town incorporated in 1951 with about two thousand people, then grew explosively as Motorola arrived and the winter-resort trade boomed, and its merchants agreed on a look: the Old West, rendered in false fronts along Brown Avenue and Main Street, marketed under the slogan “The West’s Most Western Town.” Tourists came for the cowboy fantasy, and shops opened to sell them the Southwest.
Mexican Imports opened on Brown Avenue in that first wave, in the mid-1950s, selling the handmade goods that have always come north from Mexico to furnish the desert — Talavera, tin, glass, textiles. It was a smart product for the moment. The Valley’s new ranch-house subdivisions and resort casitas wanted patios that looked like the Southwest, and this was where you bought the pots and lanterns to make them look that way. The Sugar Bowl opened over on Scottsdale Road in 1958; Los Olivos had been on 2nd Street since 1947; the Rusty Spur started pouring on Main in 1951. Mexican Imports belongs to that generation — the handful of Old Town businesses that arrived with the theming and are still doing the job they came to do.
The decades since remade the district around it several times. The galleries came in the 1960s and 1970s and turned Main Street into an art district; the bars and clubs arrived later and turned the east end into a nightlife zone; the boutique hotels and high-rises are the current wave. Import shops elsewhere in the Valley came and went with each cycle. This one kept its Brown Avenue storefront and its truckloads of color, which is why a visitor today can walk into a real 1950s Old Town shop, buy a real Puebla platter for a reasonable price, and walk out onto a sidewalk that has been selling the West since before they were born.