Make no mistake, we are living through the most important time in Arizona’s history. What makes this time so pivotal goes much deeper than what is going on with the controversial issues of today. More important is the cause of what is going on, and why.
THREE SONORANS BLOG, JULY 2010
His real name was David Morales, but he was known as Abie—although a legion of dedicated readers simply identified him with his controversial Tucson blog moniker, Three Sonorans. Our first meeting took place at a sports bar on Speedway Boulevard, where I had often cruised in my high school friend’s souped-up racecars as a youth, when Tucson’s grand crossroad was hailed as the “ugliest street in America” by Life Magazine. Within days, I found myself riding shotgun on Morales’s online updates and attacks on the state’s political mayhem, as he maneuvered the quickly changing media highways.
Few knew he had been an accomplished doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Arizona or that he had grown up in the once-hardscrabble town of Marana, when cotton farms still defined the area’s stretches of desert. His father, a Vietnam vet and copper miner at the nearby BHP mine in San Manuel, had served as a Republican member of the town council in the late 1980s and early ’90s. By the time Morales entered the University of Arizona in 1997, the shrewd town leaders had annexed the unincorporated tracks of suburban sprawl and golf courses and big-box strip malls that stretched along the I-10 corridor, and locked their fate to that of Tucson.
One late spring night on the UA campus in 2010, with only the cubicles in the science and math buildings lit up during the after-hours, Morales found his attention wandering from the equations on his computer screen. Arizona had become the “focal point” in the nation, in his mind, and “the butt of late-night jokes.” What the heck had happened? Did people really know about these Arizona legislators, Morales wondered, who had been allowed to write and pass the state’s controversial SB 1070 “papers, please” immigration law?
The mathematician turned to his computer screen and started thumping on the keyboard. He logged on to his MathGeneRation’s Weblog. Instead of an analysis of a theory or formula, he began to compose a different kind of blog entry:
This is a story you should all know.
I think this story is very telling, and since no one else is covering it, I will. And what I write can be used by any news source, because a story this sexy should be on the news! I will keep it short and simple. This is a story about Steve Montenegro who lives in Arizona. Who is Mr. Montenegro? Mr. Montenegro is a pastor of a Pentecostal church in Phoenix. He is also an immigrant and was born in El Salvador. Most of his church congregation are so called “illegal aliens.” . . . Mr. Montenegro, despite being the spiritual leader of a group of good Godfearing Christians, and deriving an income from these same people, is also a politician. But not just any politician! Mr. Montenegro is also a member of the Arizona state legislature.
What party affiliation do you think the person described above has? You would be wrong if you guessed Democrat, because Representative Montenegro is a hard-core Republican, and lately has taken to the airwaves to voice his support for Russell Pearce’s SB1070.
Once Morales posted his blog, his life would never be quite the same. Some would add: Tucson would never be the same. Within a month, surprised by the response and encouragement, he transferred his blog to the Tucson Citizen website, an unpaid operation at the city’s longest-running newspaper, which had folded its print edition in 2009. It had been founded in 1870 by Richard McCormick, the “prince of carpetbaggers” and eventual territorial governor of Arizona, who had used his former wartime newspaper skills to promote the mining and merchant interests of a virtual oligarchy in the territory. Now, it seemed, the Gannett-owned Tucson Citizen was in the hands of a gaggle of volunteer bloggers.
On January 8, 2011, a blog posting from Morales’s portable phone brought down the Tucson Citizen server. Seated at a Pima County Democratic Party meeting one Saturday morning, he had been taking notes on a special resolution against HB 2281, the state legislature’s thinly veiled ban on Mexican American Studies in Tucson, which equates the critical pedagogy approach of teaching Mexican American history and literature to the “overthrow of the government,” and the fostering of resentment, ethnic solidarity, and division. Outraged by the unfounded accusation, the Tucson Democrats declared that Mexican American Studies “should not only be left as-is but should be expanded to include more ethnicities and cultures in every school throughout Arizona.”
Then Morales received an urgent text. After confirming with a couple of other Democrats who had also received the message, he quickly posted his blog entry: “Gabrielle Giffords shot in head in Tucson.” Picked up by Google news, the Tucson Citizen site reportedly crashed within minutes, setting off local and national news investigations.
As the blogger noted the next day, the Giffords tragedy was strangely but inextricably entangled in the Mexican American Studies and immigration conflicts. One of the slain, federal court judge John Roll, had been assigned to hear the case of the Mexican American students and teachers in Tucson challenging the constitutionality of the state ban. Roll had also received death threats two years earlier when he presided over a multimillion-dollar suit filed by undocumented immigrants who had been abused by an Arizona vigilante on the border. On the same day of the shooting, someone had coincidently vandalized the Cesar Chavez Building on the University of Arizona campus, which houses the Social Justice Education Project and the Mexican American Studies program.
Morales’s tall, robust figure, scraggly beard, and camera had become a fixture at Tucson political events. He always wore one of his trademark hats—a beret, a Panama hat, a ball cap—and stood on the right side of the room, holding a video camera that had become an extension of his identity over the past year. He carried his cellphone in his other hand.
Within a year, more than 1 million viewers had logged on to read Three Sonorans. From its ardent followers in southern Arizona’s Latino, liberal, and youth communities, to business and political power brokers, it had become the bookmarked must-read on Arizona politics and immigration issues. It had also drawn its fair share of enemies from both sides of the aisle. The blog was an equal-opportunity muckraker, as critical of the compromises of liberals and Democrats as any ploys by Tea Party extremists. More important, it marked the entrance and evolving power of a new generation of social-mediasavvy voices that would transform Arizona’s SB 1070 state of the union.
With the themes of “Desert, Science and Hot Dogs,” the Three Sonorans blog issued a prophecy in the dog days of the “SB 1070 summer” with an audacious headline: “The Rebirth of Arizona.”
After a brief overview of the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, the appointment of former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security, and the ascension of Jan Brewer to power, and then the subsequent fallout over SB 1070, Morales addressed the national implications of Arizona’s brewing showdown.
Due to the events of the last two years, Arizona is now being forced to confront an issue that is about to be awakened nationwide in a larger scale very soon, and that is the issue of xenophobia and racism. In this election year Arizona will head in one of two directions. The first direction is down the path we are on now, and bills will be passed that include denying citizenship to persons born here in direct violation of the 14th amendment, along with other racist bills. The second direction will be a new path, one that will lead to a rebirth of Arizona. Arizona has changed a lot in the last century, and the demographics have drastically changed. There was no international border when Arizona became a state, nor was there Border Patrol. Go back a few more decades and Arizona was in a different nation. A lot has changed, but this election will determine a crucial question. Will we be able to live as a diverse society in peace, or will xenophobia consume us?