Life in Arizona for undocumented immigrants since SB 1070 passed is a combination of basic survival under a climate of hate and inspiring organizing that will one day turn hate to love.
CARLOS GARCIA, PUENTE ARIZONA
Governor Jan Brewer kicked off her book tour in the fall of 2011 in Alabama, as if to give her signature of Arizona’s role in influencing the states’ rights rebellion on immigration policy across the nation. Driven by SB 1070 author Kris Kobach’s approach of “attrition through enforcement,” Alabama’s HB 56 actually went a few steps further than Arizona. It required schools to check and report the immigration status of their students; kept undocumented students from attending public colleges and universities; required police checks of citizenship or valid immigration status from suspects stopped for any infraction, including routine traffic stops; and made it a felony for an unauthorized immigrant to enter into a contract with a government entity.
Declaring that states’ rights had been “disrespected” by the Obama administration, Brewer praised Alabama’s move and trumpeted her state’s singular role in “paving the way” for the rest of the nation.
“President Obama’s administration had done nothing—nothing—to work with us to secure the border,” Brewer’s memoir declared. In Alabama, she remained resilient and even more convinced that a post–SB 1070 Arizona “won’t be intimidated, and we won’t back down.”
In that same period, the Arizona Capitol Times headlined former Arizona governor and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Chief Janet Napolitano’s announcement of a deportation milestone. For the third straight year, the federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had posted a new record, deporting 396,906 illegal immigrants in the fiscal year that ended September 30—since his inauguration, President Obama had removed more than 1.1 million people from the United States.
Writing in the Huffington Post, immigrant rights advocate Joshua Hoyt attempted to place these statistics into a human realm beyond Arizona’s borders: “What does this very large number of 396,906 mean for families and U.S. citizen children? Let us assume that at least two-thirds of the deportees are married, with an average of 2.5 children. Thus, from the perspective of ICIRR [Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights], the impact of this year’s accomplishments by ICE is that 654,895 children—most of them U.S. citizens—have lost a parent during just the past year due to deportation.”
In the spring of 2012, ICE released its first-ever report to Congress on the impact of deportation policies on US-born children. In the first six months of the previous year, the federal government had deported 46,000 parents of children who were American citizens; another 21,860 parents had been given orders to leave. The fate of these American children was unknown.
“We have made the enforcement of our immigration laws smarter and more effective,” Napolitano said, testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The administration had focused “our finite resources on removing those individuals who fit our highest priorities,” and pursued undocumented residents with criminal backgrounds. They weren’t simply deportees; they were criminals.
While Brewer railed about the “backdoor amnesty” policies of the Obama administration, the administration had placed a priority on pursuing undocumented residents all, with or without criminal records. In fact, no other recent administration—except for Eisenhower, who launched Operation Wetback—had gone to such levels to deport residents. (In the 1930s, Hoover “repatriated” nearly 500,000 Mexican laborers.) For Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, the record figures highlighted “a failure of our government to come to grips with our broken immigration system.”
The broken immigration system went far beyond Arizona’s front lines. In the summer of 2011, ICE announced new rules that effectively required all municipalities and states to cooperate in Secure Communities (S-Comm), a high-tech program that allows FBI and law enforcement agencies to share fingerprinting records with ICE to check against immigration databases. Several states, such as Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts, had attempted to withdraw from the program, claiming that it had led to unfair sweeps of nonviolent offenders or working immigrants—such as those parents with US-born children and spouses—without a criminal past. According to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, less than 20 percent of the undocumented residents apprehended as part of the Secure Communities agreement in his state had been convicted of a serious crime.
“The heart of the concern is that the program, conceived of as a method of targeting those people who pose the greatest threat to our communities, is in fact having the opposite effect and compromising public safety by deterring witnesses to crime and others from working with law enforcement,” wrote New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
As the linchpin in the Obama administration’s aggressive approach to deportation, Napolitano, whose Department of Homeland Security oversaw ICE, didn’t relent. ICE’s announcement rebuked the states that had announced plans to opt out of Secure Communities with a friendly reminder that they didn’t have a choice.
“Today’s announcement confirms ICE’s status as a rogue agency,” said Chris Newman of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, an immigrant rights group. “The level of deception involved in S-Comm so far has been alarming, but this moves things to another level. A contract is a contract—but apparently not when it comes to ICE.
“A federal judge already found that DHS and ICE went out of their way to mislead the public about Secure Communities. Today’s announcement shows that ICE also systematically misled the states, engaging in protracted negotiations—at substantial cost to the American public—for what it now claims are sham contracts. But all the deception in the world can’t hide the fact that S-Comm is horrible policy.”
In many respects, S-Comm reminded us that we all lived in Arizona’s post–SB 1070 world now.
At a special congressional hearing on border security on May 8, 2012, Michael Fisher, head of the US Border Patrol, announced the agency’s “New Strategic Plan and the Path Forward” and an accelerated approach to work more closely with local law enforcement agencies. With deportations at record highs and apprehensions of undocumented entries by migrants at their lowest since 1970, the new four-year plan signaled an increasing push in the Obama administration’s immigration efforts and called for “expanding the use of consequences to punish people who enter the country illegally instead of the revolving-door policy of the past,” according to the Arizona Republic. In an interview with Terry Sterling at the Daily Beast, immigration attorney Ezequiel Hernandez concluded, “That would mean detaining migrants who were formerly caught and released at the border, which could be a boon to Corrections Corporation of America, which contracts with federal officials to transport and house their immigrant charges.”
As Russell Pearce once wrote, “Arizona did not make illegal, illegal, illegal was already illegal.” “I’ve been in law enforcement most of my life,” he told an interviewer in the aftermath of SB 1070 in 2010. “I like putting the bad guys in jail. I’m very vigilant, always have been. I never intended to run for office . . . and I never expected to be the icon on these issues from coast to coast. But I did expect to be vigilant in the defense of freedom and liberty and the Second Amendment and God-given rights. I’ve been vigilant on these issues for years, but when you do certain things all of a sudden it becomes a national story, a national issue.”
Whether or not Pearce had been brought down as a national icon for Arizona’s vigilance, the Arizona Capitol Times noted one key detail in the report on the record number of deportations Napolitano had overseen through Secure Communities: “Most of those had been convicted of driving under the influence.”
“Illegal immigrants caught in traffic stops often are pressured into signing an agreement to leave the United States and to pay a fine or somehow acknowledge responsibility for the traffic offense and thereby end up in the statistics as criminals even though they never went to court,” Marshall Fitz, immigration policy director at the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, told an ABC News reporter.
DUIs and other traffic violations had become the ticket to deportation, the new benchmark for our immigration policy.
On a summer evening in 1988, immigration paddy wagons probably would have roared by the car accident on the Phoenix patch of I-17. When the police arrived at the scene, the driver who had slammed into the van of an elderly man was “unsteady” on her feet. Her car had gone through a fairly significant bang-up. With her breath reeking of alcohol, unable to pass a couple of field sobriety tests on the side of the road, the driver was handcuffed and escorted to the Department of Public Safety station, according to Arizona Republic reports, where officers planned to test her blood-alcohol level.
Jan Brewer told the police she had only drunk one scotch. Well, actually, she admitted, make that two. When the officers realized her identity as a state legislator, they passed on the test and sent her home. Charges were dismissed because of her legislative immunity.
Attorney General Tom Horne had more of a problem with I-10 and Arizona Highway 51. In the course of one eighteen-month period, he had racked up six traffic violations in his beloved Jaguar, including a speeding ticket in a school zone. In his 2010 attorney general race, he admitted that he had openly lied on an Arizona Corporation Commission form from 1997 to 2000 about his history of bankruptcy on the East Coast; he had the distinction of being banned forever from the Securities and Exchange Commission after he “willfully aided and abetted” securities law violations as president of an investment firm that declared bankruptcy in 1970. In the spring of 2012, the FBI launched an investigation into Horne’s alleged illegal “collaboration with an independent expenditure committee,” which had bankrolled campaign ads against his opponent in 2010. The FBI also opened an inquiry into Horne’s subsequent hiring of the campaign committee’s chairwoman for an upper-level position in the attorney general’s office. In denying the allegations, Horne claimed he had been “subjected to a major smear.”
As the former head of the Motor Vehicle Division in Arizona, Pearce did not have the same driving trouble as his fellow colleagues; instead, he had been discharged from his position in 1999, after it was discovered that an employee under his supervision had altered a woman’s drunk-driving record.
For Tea Party State Senator Lori Klein, who reintroduced Pearce’s pet bill for the nullification of federal laws in 2012 and added to her viral online video collection by telling protesting Mexican Americans in Phoenix in the summer of 2011 to “go back to Mexico” if they didn’t agree with her views, her own DUI-while-speeding ticket became a key fixture on her campaign website: “What good is learning a lesson the hard way if you can’t share it and help others with the lesson learned?”
As Pearce had reasoned in the past over state laws, “I love government when it’s in its proper role.”
The proper role of government, as it pertained to Arizona and its final showdown for states’ rights, would ultimately be decided in the US Supreme Court: Arizona v. United States. By agreeing to hear Arizona’s appeal of the Ninth Circuit Court decision, which had ruled that “states do not have the inherent authority to enforce the civil provisions of federal immigration law,” the Supreme Court would determine whether federal immigration laws “preclude Arizona’s efforts at cooperative law enforcement and impliedly preempt these four provisions of S.B. 1070 on their face.” In brief: does Arizona have the right to be a state out of the union and carry out its own immigration policy?
Arizona openly chastised the Ninth Circuit Court’s majority opinion, which warned that “the threat of 50 states layering their own immigration enforcement rules” could derail federal immigration policy. In fact, Arizona’s case mocked such a conclusion by charging that “the disuniformity of federal immigration enforcement efforts” had actually “funneled unlawful entrants to Arizona and exacerbated the crisis that led to S.B. 1070’s enactment.”
Despite the fact that the Ninth Circuit Court concurred that Arizona faced an extraordinary immigration burden, Brewer’s legal team doubled down on making the case that an “epidemic of crime, safety risks, serious property damage, and environmental problems” was crossing the border under the control of the most sophisticated organized crime network in the world. Forced to bear a “seriously disproportionate share of the burden of an already urgent national problem,” Arizona accused federal enforcement efforts of focusing “primarily on areas in California and Texas, leaving Arizona’s border to suffer from comparative neglect.”
Brewer’s attorneys understood, like all legal observers, that “the federal government has exclusive authority to regulate immigration.” In 2010, Center for American Progress analyst Ian Millhiser reminded Arizonans that the Supreme Court had struck down a Pennsylvania law in 1941 requiring “every alien 18 years or over” to register annually with the state. “As the Court explained, state laws which intrude on immigration policy can have grave consequences for US foreign policy: ‘One of the most important and delicate of all international relationships, recognized immemorially as a responsibility of government, has to do with the protection of the just rights of a country’s own nationals when those nationals are in another country. Experience has shown that international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs to another’s subjects inflicted, or permitted, by a government.’”
As Hines v. Davidowitz establishes, Millhiser added, “the supremacy of the national power in the general field of foreign affairs, including power over immigration, naturalization and deportation, is made clear by the Constitution. This is because the decision of a single rogue state to engage in abusive behavior towards immigrants reflects upon the United States as a whole.”
Yet SB 1070, Arizona argued, “encourages the cooperative enforcement of federal immigration laws throughout all of Arizona.” Brewer’s team insisted that SB 1070 would only “supplement” the federal government’s “inadequate immigration enforcement,” not replace it, and that the state was “acutely aware of the need to respect federal authority to set the substantive rules governing immigration.”
Not that Arizona needed to ask permission in the first place. Drawing heavily from the same conservative legal theories as did Russell Pearce and his fringe Constitution Party stalwarts, Arizona’s Supreme Court challenge also invoked a notorious 2002 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft and asserted Arizona’s right as a “sovereign entity” to enforce federal laws. The Bybee memo claimed that states have “inherent authority” to authorize police officers to make warrantless arrests for federal criminal violations: “We believe such arrest authority inheres in the States’ status as sovereign entities.”
Brewer’s team added, for good measure: “The failure of federal law to authorize Arizona’s efforts in express terms is beside the point. Arizona officials have inherent authority to enforce federal law and such cooperative law enforcement is the norm, not something that requires affirmative congressional authorization. SB 1070 does not impose its own substantive immigration standards, but simply uses state resources to enforce federal rules.”
Although the Supreme Court’s consideration of SB 1070’s main provisions would go far in determining whether Arizona’s law unconstitutionally usurps the federal government’s authority to regulate immigration law and enforcement, Center for American Progress analyst Marshall Fitz added in an essay, “It bears noting that the Court’s ruling will not resolve all concerns and legal challenges posed by the Arizona law or by other state laws currently being litigated. Other state laws also create restrictions on education, housing, and private contracting, none of which will be conclusively decided by the court’s ruling in this case.” Nonetheless, Fitz concluded, “The stakes are momentous, but the constitutional arguments seem clear-cut, so we remain optimistic that the Court will strike this measure down and send a clear signal to other states considering similar legislation. The credibility of the Court as the guardian of core constitutional principles that protect every resident of the nation hangs in the balance.”
The Supreme Court’s decision had “the power to shape American life” in an extraordinary election year, the New York Times noted. By accepting the case, the Court had thrust itself into one of the most politically charged debates of our time. Its decision, of course, went far beyond the Arizona border; similar federal court injunctions on copycat immigration laws in other states, such as Alabama, Utah, and Georgia, hinged on the Court’s ruling, as well. Legislators from twenty states, ranging from Mississippi to Montana, filed amicus curiae briefs in support of Arizona’s immigration law. A week after opening arguments on April 25, 2012, a Senate committee in New Hampshire debated a resolution based on SB 1070.
“With SB 1070, Arizona declared a war of attrition on immigrants,” Puente human rights activist Carlos Garcia said in Phoenix on the eve of the Supreme Court hearing. “What was started in Arizona quickly led to the Arizonification of this country, one that treats undocumented immigrants as criminals and treats all Latinos as undocumented.”
“What happens in Arizona doesn’t stay in Arizona,” Tucson human rights activist and attorney Isabel Garcia often said, referring to the state’s vanguard role in states’ rights and punitive immigration policy. Yet after the Pearce recall, the national outpouring of solidarity with Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, and now the ruling by the Supreme Court on SB 1070 and states’ rights, that expression had more than one meaning.
“What happens in Arizona spreads,” Carlos Garcia added. “Two years ago, we said, ‘The best way to support Arizona is to fight the places where police are being enlisted as immigration officers in your own towns.’ Since that call, hundreds of campaigns have been born challenging Arizonification and turning the tide from hate to human rights.”
Indeed, when the Supreme Court struck down three out of four SB 1070 provisions on June 25, 2012, it notably allowed the controversial “papers, please” requirement for police to check the immigration status of suspects. “Arizona has paid a very high price for what amounts to a very limited, even Pyrrhic, victory today,” said Thomas Saenz, president of MALDEF, who reminded observers of a separate case over constitutional claims by civil rights groups. He added: “We must take all steps to prevent any racial profiling and unconstitutional arrests from this terrible Arizona state intrusion on federal immigration policy.”
When journalist and fifth-generation Tucsonan Mari Herreras expertly sorted fact from fiction in the Mexican American Studies fiasco for the Tucson Weekly, she debunked ten myths—“stories of mythical proportions have surrounded the fight for Mexican-American studies, with some truths sprinkled in between the lines,” she wrote—in a way that displayed one of the most illuminating but tragic, if not obscene, realities in Arizona’s education showdown. As the state celebrated its centennial in 2012, the families of its founding Mexican American pioneers—including the 60 percent of the students who made up Tucson Unified School District—still had to defend and justify the teaching of Mexican American history and literature, as if they were not part of the greater American experience.
In a harrowing crackdown on intellectual freedom and free speech, such an expulsion went beyond Tucson’s classrooms and bookshelves. Having returned to his native Tucson to serve as editor of La Estrella, the Arizona Daily Star’s Spanish-language edition, the widely admired Ernesto Portillo Jr. chronicled his dismay at being banned from the schoolroom himself, as a reporter, in 2012: “The district would rather keep out reporters in the hope the issue will go away, so it seems.” He added: “While MAS students and teachers never really had a chance, they didn’t give up, even as their passion and goals were questioned and vilified. Neither will the students, their parents and teachers give up their fight in the wake of the governing board’s decision to capitulate. For now, the students and teachers are banned.”
With the impeccable timing that continued to cement Tucson’s reputation as a hotbed of censorship, only two days after The Daily Show skewered inept Tucson school board member Michael Hicks for dismantling the Mexican American Studies program—in a cringe-worthy interview, Hicks had embarrassingly referred to civil rights icon Rosa Parks as “Rosa Clarks,” insisted that Latino teachers provided free burritos to entice students to their radical classrooms, and admitted that he had based his extremist views on “hearsay of others”—and one day after MAS director Sean Arce was sacked, the online Tucson Citizen news site announced on April 4, 2012, that it had pulled the plug on the city’s most popular Latino blogger and activist, David Morales, even though Three Sonorans drew more than 1.6 million visits to his take-no-prisoners blog.
Morales’s termination placed him in good company in Arizona’s history of Latino journalism. Nearly a half century ago, pioneering Chicano author and columnist Mario Suárez drew the wrath of Arizona Governor Howard Pyle for his investigative and biting columns in Tucson’s Prensa Mexicana newspaper on corruption and discrimination. Faced with reprisals and threats against his family, Suárez had to end his column, “El Gavilan,” but he went on to lead community and education efforts in Arizona and California.
Imbued with the local and national outrage over his dismissal, Morales launched his unrepentant and muckraking Three Sonorans blog on an independent site.
The final showdown in the extremist witch hunt to outlaw Mexican American Studies in Tucson continued in the courts; but the supremely American struggle for access to democratic education, freedom of expression, and local control of schools continued to play out on the state’s bitterly divided sides, as it had for more than a century.
“Arizona’s discrimination against Mexican American and Ethnic Studies is unconstitutional,” said Vince Rabago, a lawyer representing the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) and twenty-six education and civil rights organizations, which filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of the students’ legal challenge. “The state is arguing that ‘states’ rights’ allow them to restrict curriculum in a discriminatory manner against Mexican Americans. This is comparable to the days after desegregation where states tried to restrict efforts to reach equality. These organizations from across the country support the bedrock principles of Equal Protection and the First Amendment in an academic context.”
While schools across the country joined annual celebrations of United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez’s March 31 birthday in 2012, Tucson students reassigned from the recently outlawed Mexican American Studies program were forced to ignore Arizona’s most famous native son. Four years earlier, presidential candidate Barack Obama had joined a campaign to make Chavez’s birthday a national holiday. As part of the TUSD’s indiscriminate sweep of all textbooks, videos, and Mexican American Studies curriculums from the classrooms, Chavez’s powerful “Address to the Commonwealth Club of California” had been banished from any teacher-led discussions in Tucson.
With Arizona State Superintendent John Huppenthal declaring his intent that same month to launch an extraordinary new attack on Mexican American Studies at the university level, Chavez’s prophetic speech had never seemed more timely–and more dangerous to the Arizona Tea Party and its enablers like TUSD Superintendent John Pedicone in Tucson.
“These trends are part of the forces of history that cannot be stopped,” Chavez had admonished his listeners in 1984. “No person and no organization can resist them for very long. They are inevitable. Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. Our opponents must understand that it’s not just a union we have built. Unions, like other institutions, can come and go. But we’re more than an institution. For nearly twenty years, our union has been on the cutting edge of a people’s cause—and you cannot do away with an entire people; you cannot stamp out a people’s cause.”
Looking back at his longtime work with the United Farm Workers and their struggles, including campaigns for child labor protections, environmental justice, workplace safety, and basic civil rights, Chavez defiantly framed how the union workers had “sent out a signal to all Hispanics that we were fighting for our dignity, that we were challenging and overcoming injustice, that we were empowering the least educated among us—the poorest among us. The message was clear: if it could happen in the fields, it could happen anywhere—in the cities, in the courts, in the city councils, in the state legislatures.”
Nearly three decades later, no one understood that reality more than the Tea Party–led legislature in Arizona and extremist state officials like Brewer, Pearce, Horne, and Huppenthal—and a new generation of Latinos and their allies across all ethnic lines and divisions. Flanked by the implacable Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Russell Pearce greeted a packed house of Tea Party activists in Mesa on March 19 and announced his campaign to reclaim a State Senate seat in the 2012 election. “One thing we need in this country are fighters,” Arpaio said. “Never surrender.” Standing outside the event in a symbolic protest, Randy Parraz and his Citizens for a Better Arizona ranks embodied that sentiment more than Arpaio, Pearce, or their Tea Party minions could ever realize.
“The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm,” Chavez had concluded. “Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism. That day may not come this year. That day may not come during this decade. But it will come, someday!”
That day was now in Tucson, in Mesa, and across Arizona, where Chavez’s very words were now outlawed. That day was now in the United States.
“Yet we are filled with hope and encouragement. We have looked into the future and the future is ours,” Chavez declared. “History and inevitability are on our side.”
In the end, these combined showdowns clearly galvanized a new generation of inspired and motivated voters in Arizona and around the country.
“The crisis of Mexican American Studies and SB 1070 is not an isolated one,” said Selina Rodriguez, who graduated from the MAS program and now directs a youth center in Santa Monica, California. “It will continue to affect our state and nation as a whole. I have witnessed firsthand how students and scholars from across the country have come in solidarity in support of MAS and the Tucson community. I have seen the passion in the eyes of students, teachers, family members, and those who have been touched by MAS strive to preserve and protect the program. MAS taught me to move forward—adelante— while making sure my community is right alongside me. My work and ideology will continue to hold these values close. To never forget the knowledge, traditions, and teachings of our community and to share what I learn with others.”
Looking at the way the Pearce recall spurred new Latino voters to take to the polls, Voto Latino director Maria Teresa Kumar could barely hide her enthusiasm for future elections: “Arizona may well become a shining example of what happens to Republican candidates who try to win by demonizing Latinos.”
As one Arizona Republican official noted, “immigration fatigue” had begun to sink the party. Or as Phoenix playwright and Hispanic Chamber of Commerce spokesperson James Garcia told the New York Times, “There has been a tangible, palpable momentum shift in the state, which is essentially saying, ‘Well, that was a disaster, and what should we do about it?’”
Garcia’s question underlined a slight shift in media perceptions, as well. When Time magazine nominated Governor Brewer for its “Time 100” poll of the most influential movers and shakers on the world scene in 2012, it reminded readers that “under the leadership of Republican Brewer, Arizona has faced off with the federal government like no other state in recent memory.” Yet to the amazement of Arizonans—and the world—and in a bold forecast of the state’s future, Brewer’s singular role was nudged from the ranks of the people “that inspire us, entertain us, challenge us and change our world.” Instead, in her place, Time selected Dulce Matuz, a twenty-seven-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, who was an Arizona State University graduate in electrical engineering and cofounder of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, and hailed her as the “finest of her generation.”
“We are Americans,” Matuz proclaimed, “and Americans don’t give up.”
Time also ran a cover story in February 2012 on “Why Latino Voters Will Swing the 2012 Election,” including Arizona as a swing state that could tip toward President Obama thanks to Latino turnout. Western states, where the margin of victory often hung on one to three percentage points, the projected 8.7 percent increase in Latino voters emerged as crucial for Obama’s reelection. In a breakdown of changing demographics, Time showed Latino voting ranks had grown in every one of those states, reminding its readership that fifty thousand new Latino voters came of age every month. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos were on pace to reach 30 percent of the total US population by 2050. In June, Obama embraced the Dream Act and issued an order to halt deportation of undocumented youth and to grant work permits.
“In Arizona, it is the marginalized youth who will (re)create and influence our cities and neighborhoods,” Selina Rodriguez added. “Youth are our foundation and engine. It is their creativity and savvy that can keep a community, business, or political entity from thriving. According to the 2010 Census, Arizona’s greatest growth appeared to be among relatively young ‘Hispanics.’ The majority of this population understands the concept of struggle and what it means to persevere. The battle over Mexican American Studies underscored the future generation of our state who will carry on the knowledge and culture of our community.”
The key question, however, was not over the growing numbers or changing demographics, but the issues that would propel new voters to the polls in ranks that matter.
“This whole issue of trying to demonize the Latino population,” said Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis, one of the leaders of the civil rights movement, had effectively made “immigration the new civil rights movement.” Lewis argued that such a movement had to go beyond Arizona’s borders. “Too many of our brothers and sisters are being racially profiled because of their background, last name, or the language they may speak,” he said. “The state of Georgia is copying the state of Arizona, and I think there will be other states to follow the same path. When you take on the immigrant population, you’re taking on all of us. During the Freedom Rides, we were saying, in effect, you arrest one of us, you’re going to arrest all of us. You beat fifteen or twenty of us, then you’re going to have to beat more than four hundred of us. I see parallels between then and now. There must be a real movement to resist this attempt to say that people who come from another land are not one of us.”
More than a half century ago, William Faulkner confronted the racism in Lewis’s youth among his fellow Southerners who quietly allowed the South to “wreck and ruin itself in less than a hundred years.” He warned Southerners to “speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say: ‘Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?’”
Writing in 1962, Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater wrote a prediction for the state’s centennial celebration: “Our ties with Mexico will be much more firmly established in 2012 because sometime within the next fifty years the Mexican border will become as the Canadian border, a free one, with the formalities and red tape of ingress and egress cut to a minimum so that the residents of both countries can travel back and forth across the line as if it were not there.”
His camera fixed to the right side, as always, Three Sonorans blogger Morales understood Faulkner’s admonition. In the aftermath of the outlawing of Mexican American Studies and the fallout over SB 1070, he sat down on Salomon Baldenegro Sr.’s couch and asked the veteran Chicano leader of Tucson how he managed to keep up his jovial and almost incorrigibly optimistic view, especially in the most despairing moments.
“Since 1848, when the war ended with Mexico, there have been attempts to marginalize us,” Baldenegro said, sitting back in his armchair. “There have been laws passed that said we couldn’t speak our language. Laws and policy passed that we couldn’t practice our traditions, such as Cinco de Mayo, in public. There were laws passed that you couldn’t live in a certain neighborhood, or that we couldn’t vote. Even policies that prohibited Mexican kids—farmworker kids—from going to school. But if you study our history, you will see we have won every single time, we have won. We are resilient. Our history is not one of victimization. Our history is one of achievement. We have not only survived all manner of attacks, we have gone forward. And we’re going to win again. This should give people resilience to fight the fight.”
Baldenegro paused for a moment, looked away, and then turned back and faced the Tucson blogger.
“If Brewer, Pearce, Huppenthal, and Horne studied our history, they’d give it up, because they’d realize we’re going to win again.”