In 2022, something unusual happened in the City of South Tucson: three volunteers at a soup kitchen known for its left-wing political advocacy were elected to the city council.
They ran on an ambitious platform of fighting gentrification and housing the city’s poor. While some of it has come to pass, being inside the government has changed their perspectives and priorities.
As the end of their first terms on city council approaches, AZPM News looks back at their track record in the tiny city that Brian Flagg, a city council member and long-time local activist, calls a “one-square-mile place to experiment.”
Part III
Months from the end of his first term, Flagg said being in office has changed him.
“I care much more about cops and public safety and thriving business community than I did when I was a younger guy,” he said.
South Tucson’s crime rate is almost triple that of Tucson, according to police data. Flagg said public safety, not housing, turned out to be residents’ top concern. This forced the Casa Maria contingent on city council — which gained two members, and a majority, in 2024 — to pivot.
The city got a million-dollar gift from the Pascua Yaqui tribe that it plans to use for public safety. It replaced its struggling fire department with subcontractor Rural Metro in a move city leaders say will improve service in the future.
Good fire and police service make South Tucson attractive to businesses, Flagg said, which generate the tax revenue the city needs.
At the moment, a vacant Food City supermarket, which closed its doors in October, is a gaping hole in South Tucson’s main business corridor along South 6th Avenue. Later this month, Valenzuela said, the city council will vote on repealing its grocery tax, hoping to attract a new supermarket to the property.
But in the shopping plaza around the vacant store, life goes on, including at Southern Blends Barbershop, opened last year by 35-year-old Adrian Quijada.
Quijada has deep ties to the area. After being “around the wrong people” in his youth and serving four years in prison — where he cut hair for staff and inmates — he returned to South Tucson.
“It has a bad stigma to it. But me, growing up, it was somewhere that wasn’t what it is now. I feel that we could do a change,” he said.
For Quijada, the empty parking lot around the shuttered Food City has proven to be an opportunity. He fills it up with trunk-or-treat events at Halloween and toy drives for Christmas. His priority, he said, is offering more to the children in the community he grew up in.
“I try to do my best just to do a different kind of change as well here,” he said.
Valenzuela, Flagg and Aguirre are running for their city council seats again this year. They are set to face several challengers in the July election.
