Arizona insurgent.

• Author: Lydersen, Kari
• Position: Wenona Benally Baldenegro

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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee counts the First District in Arizona on its "Red-to-Blue" list. Anticipating a tough general election, most prominent Democrats are backing former Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, who lost her seat in 2010 to a tea party-backed Republican with no political experience. But an insurgent Democrat is running against Kirkpatrick in the August 28 primary. Meet Wenona Benally Baldenegro.

Benally Baldenegro is Navajo. She grew up on the reservation in the mining town of Kayenta. She saw how uranium and coal mining left locals with toxic contamination but little economic development. Her husband is Sal Baldenegro Jr., an activist whose parents--Cecilia Cruz and Sal Baldenegro Sr.--are icons of the Southwestern Chicano rights and labor movements of past decades.

The redrawn First District now covers a vast swath of central Arizona encompassing mostly rural towns and parts of eleven Indian reservations. The largest metropolis is Flagstaff, where Benally Baldenegro lives. Thirty-nine percent of registered voters in the redrawn district are registered as Democrats, compared with 30 percent Republican and 30 percent Independent. At 22 percent, the district has the nation's largest Native American constituency.

Benally Baldenegro is endorsed by Congressmen Raul Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, and Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, who lead the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She also gets the nod from the Progressive Democrats of America, the United Steelworkers, and the lnternational Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

"We're going to support people based on issues and policies, period," says Grijalva. "After some of Kirkpatrick's votes, I couldn't support her just because she's the presumptive winner."

Those votes included backing an extension of the Bush tax cuts and opposing the Obama Administration's cap and trade proposal on global warming. Kirkpatick also called the Obama Administration's legal challenge to the anti-immigrant law SB 1070 a "sideshow."

Kirkpatrick has twelve times as much money and higher name recognition than Benally Baldenegro. But Benally Baldenegro has an energetic, multicultural activist core of followers with a strong presence in social media.

"She's kind of like a Ron Paul," says professor Stephen Nuno, who teaches in the department of politics and international affairs at Northern Arizona University. "But she's not crazy."

Hayden, Arizona...