Southern Arizona

Finally, a few other stories you should know about.

A Southern Arizona lawmaker says years of violent threats have transformed her home into something resembling a fortress, raising troubling questions about the personal cost of public service.

Arizona State Representative Alma Hernandez describes installing security cameras, reinforced locks, window bars, and floodlights after receiving repeated threats over her political positions.

Hernandez, whose sister Consuelo represents a legislative district that includes Bisbee, has faced harassment from both the political left and right.

The Spanish presence in what is now Arizona was an extension of this mining frontier.

The Jesuit missionaries who established missions in the Pimeria Alta, the region that includes present-day Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were motivated by religious conversion, but the colonial infrastructure they helped create served the economic interests of the Crown, including mineral exploration.

The famous mission of San Xavier del Bac, south of present-day Tucson, was founded in sixteen ninety-two by Father Eusebio Kino, and the mission system he and his successors established provided a network of settlements that supported Spanish military and economic penetration into the region.

Mining operations existed throughout the colonial period in what is now Southern Arizona, primarily for silver and copper, and some of these operations were substantial.

The town of Tubac, established as a presidio in seventeen fifty-two, was associated with nearby mining activity, and the Planchas de Plata silver discovery in seventeen thirty-six, just south of the present-day border, produced silver slabs of extraordinary size and purity and triggered a brief mining rush in the region.

Whether any of this activity extended as far north as the Superstition Mountains is an open question.

Skookdash.

I'm Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, Pima County Recorder in Southern Arizona.

Awesome.

Thank you so much for doing this with us today.

That's how you and I met through your work there and through other things through the Arizona Technology Council here in Arizona.

Tell us about the Kyle Institute, if you would, and why is it important for Southern Arizona and the whole U.S.?

The Kyle Institute for National Security, it's a 5013C nonprofit that is formally affiliated with the University of Arizona.

It was re-designated to the Kyle Institute after the great Arizona Senator John Kyle in January of this past year.

And what I've learned is really that there's a couple things that make Tucson special.

Besides just the geography and the natural beauty of the Southwest, I would say you have at Davis Month in here, location, location, location matters.

It is deep in Southern Arizona and is connected to almost a continuous stretch of airspace from New Mexico all the way to California that provides some of the best flying and training opportunities anywhere in the world.

And as we look to have fifth gen and more advanced aircraft, Having that ability to have large swaths of airspace to test things is incredibly important.

The changes to leadership positions is just one of the goals Hegseth will lay out.

Police in Southern Arizona say a supposed new ransom note in the kidnapping of eighty-four-year-old Nancy Guthrie is not credible.

Mark Mayfield reports.

The Pima County Sheriff's Department released a statement on Tuesday.

It's lands that came into its possession as a result of Indian treaties or agreements with other nations, like the one that, for example, divided the Pacific Northwest between England and the United States, or the one that brought us the Southwest, the Mexican Treaty at the end of the Mexican War.

the Gadsden purchase that added Southern Arizona, the Louisiana purchase, of course, that had preceded all of those, all of those had come in as general land office public lands that were intended to be privatized.

That's why we set up the whole homestead plan.

We were going to gradually, as settlement moved west, turn those lands over to private individuals.