Oregon-based Sue Liebetrau has been coming to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show since 1982. She is a “well-aged” collector of gems and minerals with a particular interest in petrified woods, though her fascination began at an early age. Her collection has grown into a full-time hobby.
“You know that little kid going around picking up rocks and sticks? That was me,” she says.
The 56th annual show has brought together vendors, collectors and buyers from India to Argentina to create another year of the reputed world’s largest gem show.
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Shoppers and spectators are welcomed into hotels and tent cities to see the natural wonders of the world. Objects for sale can be extravagant: a crystal chunk of purple and clear Kunzite for $34,000; a nest of 25 red and gray fossilized eggs set in a lit case with a note that reads “DO NOT TOUCH DINOSAUR NEST, $37,500.” But for the more frugal shoppers, there are beads, singing bowls, moon rocks and even a $25 stone tissue box.
Walking the halls of the hotels-turned-strip-malls is something like spinning a globe. At Hotel Tucson signs posted on the doors read: Austria, Russia, Tucson, Morocco, Peru, Tunisia, France, China and Czech Republic. The doors are open, and the beds are removed. Vendors invite shoppers in using sparse English to take a look at the products set up in cases and on folding tables they cart around the world. Visitors in the ballroom can walk among the towering skeletons of an Albertosaurus and Giant Ground Sloth casted from the bones of the ancient creatures. Raw materials used to make beads and jewelry sit beside stone jewelry set in gold, silver and wire. Price tags mark the material, $25 for a kilo of quartz and $2 for stromatolite.
“For you I make a special price. Only $5,” says Manik B.S. to a customer holding up a bead from a bulk bin at the Riverpark Inn.
Shayna Dimond, a vendor and jeweler from the east coast, has been working at the show for the last six years selling rough quartz, topaz and dolomite from Brazil. She sits beside the stones in a room at the La Quinta Inn, reference books on crystal energy at an arm’s reach. Every crystal has energy. Energy work is using those vibrations through meditation, she says.
Vendors and customers who have been to similar shows in Munich or Bangkok agree: This is the biggest show in the world.
“It’s like going to Mecca, where everyone has to go at least once in their lives,” says Liebetrau, the Oregon-based collector. “The variety and quality of minerals here is better than you can find in a museum.”
The show attracted about 50,000 people and $100 million in 2007, according to the most recent survey conducted by the Tucson Convention and Visitor Bureau, says Kimberly Schmitz, their director of public relations. The event, which is 40 percent Tucson-based businesses, consists of 44 shows in 42 different locations.
“Those are inaccurate representations of the gem show,” she says. “It’s the Tucson Gem show!”
While the gem show attracts new vendors and new shoppers every year, it also has its loyalists. This is the second year for Chen Hou-Xi and his wife from Hunan, China. Pedro Jimenez and Ana de Los Santos are South-American vendors who have been trekking to Tucson, stones in tow, for many years. Though they both now work from the United States, their products carry an inherent sense of their cultures.
Jimenez is a Peruvian-born stone worker who specializes in handcrafted Kachinas, figures that represent supernatural beings. The Kachinas take on the shapes of animals and deities, like sun dancers and corn maidens. The eagle dancer Kachinas have the bodies of men with pitch-black wings attached to the arms and a feather in each hand. The turquoise heads are topped with feathered headdresses. He also crafts different figurines like “Ancient Peruvian Natives,” warriors dressed in golden robes and helmets with daggers in their hands.
Jimenez relocated from Peru to Santa Fe, N.M., 20 years ago. He was taken in by local Apache Indians who gave him the name Blue Elk, now the moniker of his business.
“It’s such an honor,” he says about the name that once belonged to their medicine man.
Jimenez has been showing his work at the Tucson Convention Center for the past 10 years. He enjoys seeing the other exhibits as much as showing his own. It is all the natural beauty the world has to offer put into one place, he says.
“People love what I do,” he says. “That’s the best part. People enjoy seeing your dream come true.”
De Los Santos, or “The Condor Lady” as she is known, is a mine owner from Buenos Aires, Argentina, who exports agate minerals, mostly condor agates. Condors are minerals with a glass-like surface with red, gray and sky-blue rings that resemble the rings in a tree trunk when cut and polished. Like many of the vendors, her life consists of constant traveling.
“I don’t live there,” she says of her house in California. “ I live on the road.”
De Los Santos travels to Argentina twice a year to collect the materials. From there she travels to different shows around the world. Compared to shows she has been to in Germany and France, Tucson outranks them all, she says.
“I love to come here,” she says. “For the gem world, this is the center of the world.”
