The Luis Gutierrez Bridge Spans the Santa Cruz River; It Also Links Both Parts of a Divided Community and Makes Connections to the Past

by Alice Whittenburg At 8:45 on October 14, if a thin veil of high clouds hadn’t occluded the morning sun, a work of solar art commemorating the Tucson Pressed Brick Company would have appeared on the Luis Gutierrez Bridge on Tucson’s West Side. Because of those clouds, seven people, including myself, who had gathered on …

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Ofelia Zepeda’s Ocean Power and the Apocalyptic American Summer of 2020

Black and white photograph of Sonoran desert

by Greg Evans Anybody who reads the Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda’s collection of poems, Ocean Power: Stories from the Desert, might reasonably assume she is being ironic with the title. What power, after all, can an ocean have over a people who live in the Arizona desert, “That land where the ocean has not …

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No (Green) Justice, No (Green) Peace: An Illustrated Look at the Old New Deal, the Green New Deal, and the Need for Just Solutions

Despite occasional rumors to the contrary, we are still in the midst of a pandemic, and here in the United States tens of millions of people have lost their jobs. Because businesses, especially small businesses, were forced to shut down for an extended period and their fates are still uncertain, it’s hard to say when …

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Atomic Cake: The Story of American Atomics

Recently a 40th anniversary event at Himmel Library recognized an ecological disruption uncovered in 1979 that subjected a downtown neighborhood and many residents of Tucson to four years of a steady diet of low-level radioactivity. Local activist Ted Warmbrand, who led protests then, organized the recent gathering. The article below, published in 1979 in Rocky …

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Diamond Does the Desert (reprise)

Caricature of Don Diamond as a King of Diamonds

[Ed. note: First published in our pages in 2012, we are reprinting this piece in the interests of giving a more rounded assessment of Don Diamond’s legacy than that offered by the Tucson Weekly and Inside Tucson Business, who ran identical articles about him, titled respectively “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “Mourners laud Don Diamond’s …

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