Tucsonans have been saluting a flag over their city since at least 1776, but it has not always been the same flag. Over the past 250 years the Old Pueblo has seen banners from Spain and Mexico, the United States, the Confederate States of America and, after the Civil War, the United States again — followed by the flag of the State of Arizona. Those changing standards mark the region’s passage through war, revolution, acquisition and shifting political status, but they do not capture the full story of the place they flew over.
“As a historian and a history lover, I definitely think it’s fascinating to look back in the past and place Tucson in a large context,” said David Turpie, editor of the Arizona Historical Society’s Journal of Arizona History. Turpie, who has written and edited on Arizona’s past, cautions that the neat narrative built around changing flags tends to erase or downplay the people who occupied and shaped the land before colonizers planted their colors. “The main issue, if I have one, with the five-flags (theme) is it completely ignores Indigenous peoples,” he said. He pointed to the Tohono O’odham as “the real founders of Tucson,” a presence that predates the heraldry of European and later American governments.
Long before any of the modern flags were sewn, the Kingdom of Spain laid symbolic claim to what is now southern Arizona. Spanish explorers had pushed into the region as early as 1540, but the royal standard — a white field centered with a red-and-gold crest — was not a common sight locally until the late 18th century. The formal establishment of a military and civic presence in the Santa Cruz River Valley came in 1775, when Spanish officer Hugo O’Conor carried out a site survey and issued a proclamation establishing the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson on Aug. 20 of that year. It is possible the Spanish banner accompanied those early movements up the valley as officials and soldiers prepared to set a foothold in the region.
A flag bearer walks past a reconstructed presidio and seated audience during a Tucson ceremony reflecting the city’s layered flag history as the nation nears its 250th anniversary.
Spanish troops dispatched from Tubac arrived in the area in late 1776 to erect and garrison the Presidio, a strongpoint meant to protect the kingdom’s northern frontier in the New World. That presence endured for decades, with Spanish rule effectively in place until the early 19th century. The sweep of events that followed in Mexico and the rest of New Spain shifted sovereignty in a relatively short arc: Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, and where the Spanish tricolor or royal standard had flown, a Mexican banner was raised.
The Mexican flag of that era was distinctive in local memory: vertical stripes framing a white field, with a golden eagle posed on a prickly pear cactus and wearing a crown. That emblem flew over the adobe walls of the Presidio and over the settlement for the next 35 years, reflecting the region’s inclusion within a newly independent Mexico. Exhibits and displays in Tucson today often bring those different banners side by side to illustrate how control of the territory changed hands. Museums and historic venues mount Arizona’s current state flag alongside earlier U.S. and Mexican flags to make visible the layers of sovereignty that have shaped the community.
A display of historic flags — including the Arizona state flag, an early U.S. banner and a Mexican flag — mounted inside a Tucson venue, illustrating the region’s changing sovereignties.
The Presidio’s control changed hands more than once in the decades that followed. One brief but notable episode came in December 1846, when elements of the U.S. Army’s Mormon Battalion entered Tucson as they marched toward California and took control of the Presidio for a day or two without firing a shot. That episode stands out as one of the early instances of U.S. military presence in the area, predating the longer-term American governance that would follow later in the 19th century. In the intervening years, and especially during and after the Civil War, Tucson’s flag history would reflect the larger national conflicts and territorial reorganizations that reshaped the Southwest.
For many in Tucson, the parade of flags helps frame the city’s milestones and commemorations: reenactments at the Presidio, public presentations of historic banners and museum displays mark anniversaries and bring visitors face-to-face with the material symbols of past sovereignties. Yet historians like Turpie urge a fuller perspective; the flags are signposts to distinct political epochs, but those epochs sit atop a deeper human history. The people of the region, particularly the Tohono O’odham and other Indigenous communities, did not begin their stories with European banners, and their presence and contributions are part of the ground on which later flags were raised.
Tucson’s landscape of memory is therefore both visual and contested: the city’s streets and plazas still host ceremonies where multiple banners appear together, and museum rooms display a succession of standards that chart changes from colonial rule through statehood. Those displays provide tangible reminders of shifting allegiances and authority, even as scholars and local leaders continue to press for narratives that more fully acknowledge the Indigenous foundations of the place. The five- or six-flag story is a useful shorthand for Tucson’s political transformations, but the city’s history encompasses far more than the cloth that fluttered overhead.