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Arivaca, known in O'odham as Ali Wa:pk, is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Pima County, Arizona.

It lies about 11 miles north of the Mexican border and 35 miles northwest of the port of entry at Nogales.

The name comes from La Aribac, an 8,677-acre Mexican land grant approved in 1833, Aribac being a Pima word meaning "small springs."

The site was probably a Pima or Tohono O'odham village abandoned after the Pima Indian Revolt of 1751, and Spanish settlers later worked small mines in the area.

Charles Poston bought the Arivaca ranch in 1856, and the reduction works for the Heintzelman Mine at Cerro Colorado were built at Arivaca.

The modern community dates to 1878: the United States Post Office was established on April 10, 1878, with Noah W. Bernard as the first postmaster, and it still operates under ZIP code 85601.

In 1879 freighter and rancher Pedro Aguirre built the Arivaca Schoolhouse, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012 as the oldest standing school building in Arizona.

The historic Arivaca mining district holds more than 100 old mines in the Las Guijas Mountains, the San Luis Mountains and Cobre Ridge, which produced gold, silver, lead, copper and tungsten from Spanish colonial times intermittently into the 1950s.

The 2020 United States census counted 623 people in the Arivaca CDP, down 10.4 percent from 695 in 2010.

The 2020 census counted 328 households and 415 housing units in the CDP, of which 87 stood vacant, and the median age was 61.5 years.