Brooks Jeffery and Becky Orozco – Preserving Place & Empowering Community: The Past, Present, and Future of Camp Naco

This presentation is by Zoom only. To register Click Here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

Camp Naco is a cornerstone of Buffalo Soldier history in Arizona and represents the proud tradition of Black military regiments after the Civil War.  The Camp’s 17-acre site and 100+ year-old adobe buildings sit just 600 yards north of the US-Mexico border in the community of Naco Arizona and reside on the ancestral lands of the Chiricahua Apache.  In 2022, the City of Bisbee and Naco Heritage Alliance received $8.1M in funding support, initiating a 4-year journey to 1). Preserve and rehabilitate the site’s 20 buildings and open spaces;  2). Develop place-based programming to reactivate the site by interpreting its diverse cultural landscape and addressing community needs; and 3). Build organizational capacity to successfully sustain Camp Naco’s mission into the future.  This presentation will outline the diverse histories of the Camp Naco site, the tireless efforts to preserve its buildings, and the future vision to reactivate Camp Naco as a destination to honor its past while addressing contemporary needs in the border community of Naco Arizona.

Rebecca Orozco is a third-generation resident of the border in Arizona. She recently retired from Cochise College and the University of Arizona as a history and anthropology instructor. In 2021 she was named Faculty Emeritus for Cochise College.  She helped develop a cross-border studies program at Cochise College and the Center for Lifelong Learning and continues to offer non-credit history and travel programs. For the past 22 years, she has been working to save historic Camp Naco.   She discovered the camp while working to develop cross border programs for Elderhostel, an educational travel program for seniors. The abandoned adobe fort set off a quest to discover the history and then to preserve the Mexican Revolutionary War era camp built to stop the conflict from spilling across the border. After arson fires destroyed five buildings in 2006, she helped get the property transferred first to Huachuca City and then to Bisbee. The Naco Heritage Alliance was formed in 2008 and under their work, a Brownfields grant of $400,000 was secured to mitigate the asbestos from the Camp. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012 and named one of the Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places in 2022.

R. Brooks Jeffery is a heritage conservation consultant serving as Startup Executive Director of the Naco Heritage Alliance. He is a Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Arizona where he had a 35-year career as a teacher, scholar, and administrator advancing heritage conservation as part of a comprehensive ethic of environmental, cultural, and economic sustainability in places throughout the world.