People have farmed the Santa Cruz River floodplain for over 4,000 years — longer than most cities have existed at all. Archaic peoples were digging irrigation canals here around 1,200 BCE, among the first in North America. The Hohokam built on that tradition from roughly 450 to 1450 CE. When Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino founded Mission San Xavier del Bac in 1700, he was staking a claim on ground that already had a thousand years of agricultural memory. The Spanish built their presidio in 1775. Mexico took the territory in 1821. The United States bought it in 1853. The names and flags changed; the farming did not. Mission Garden exists now as a living record of that continuity — heritage crops and heirloom trees representing what this ground has produced across successive cultures. In 2015, UNESCO named Tucson the first City of Gastronomy in the United States. That designation didn't come from a restaurant scene. It came from this.
