{"id":13382,"date":"2023-08-08T15:51:41","date_gmt":"2023-08-08T15:51:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13382"},"modified":"2023-08-10T19:19:44","modified_gmt":"2023-08-10T19:19:44","slug":"joe-arpaios-surprising-legacy-in-arizona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=13382","title":{"rendered":"Joe Arpaio\u2019s Surprising Legacy in Arizona"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Not long ago, the state was known for its harsh immigration laws. But a new crop of Latino activists emerged in response\u2014and now they\u2019re catapulting themselves into elected office. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Fernanda Santos<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In the City Council chambers here, a squat, round room that evokes the traditional Navajo home known as a \u201chogan,\u201d Carlos Garcia is easy to spot. His chestnut hair, long and limp, is perennially fastened in a ponytail that hangs like a string halfway down his back. His feet are shielded by a pair of weathered sneakers. One afternoon last month, he showed up for work clad in a black golf-style shirt\u2014\u201cThat\u2019s the most dressed up you\u2019re going to see me,\u201d he quipped\u2014with the words \u201cCity of Phoenix Councilman Carlos Garcia\u201d embroidered over his heart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Garcia joined the council in March, but his style remains as casual as it was during his time protesting a mother\u2019s impending deportation<\/a> in front of the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in 2017, or chanting into a bullhorn outside the federal courthouse where Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio stood trial that same year, accused of racially profiling Latinos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of my elders a long time ago told me, \u2018If you\u2019re going to be a \npublic servant, you have to be ready when you wake up in the morning to \nmeet with the governor and to go talk to a jornalero<\/em>,\u201d Garcia \nsays, using the Spanish word for day laborer. The elder challenged him \nto use the way he dresses to telegraph who he really cares for\u2014\u201cIs it \nyour priority,\u201d the elder asked, \u201cthat you dress up to impress the \ngovernor?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy priority is to make sure people feel comfortable with me,\u201d Garcia says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By \u201cpeople,\u201d he means the people of color who for years have stood as\n targets of the politics of Arpaio and Jan Brewer, the former Republican\n governor of Arizona. Arpaio, perhaps Arizona\u2019s most nationally famous \npolitician, rode to fame in the 1990s with his draconian jail policies \nand then into President Donald Trump\u2019s favor with his tough \nanti-immigrant posture. Brewer, as governor,in 2010 signed into law the nation\u2019s toughest immigration bill, SB 1070, powering up the \u201cattrition through enforcement<\/a>\u201d strategy championed by some on the right to drive illegal immigrants out of the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly 10 years later, Garcia is part of a new wave of Latino \npoliticians in Arizona who have entered politics in response to those \npolicies\u2014a legacy that Arpaio and Brewer likely did not expect. In a \nstate that once compelled police officers to ask about the citizenship \nstatus of the people they pulled over and barred undocumented immigrants\n from getting driver\u2019s licenses and paying in-state tuition at public \nuniversities, a growing number of Latino activists are using the lessons\n they learned in organizing against the immigration crackdown to \ncatapult themselves into elected state and local office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Garcia was born in Cananea, Mexico, about 30 miles south of the border, and lived without papers in the United States until age 14. For years, he ran the Puente Human Rights Movement, one of the most aggressive immigrant-rights groups in the state. But after five of his family members were deported beginning in 2009 and one was sent to Eloy, a privately run immigration detention center southeast of Phoenix, he says, \u201cI got left with no options. And that\u2019s what has pushed someone like me to actually run for office.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is not alone. In the past 10 months, Betty Guardado, a hotel housekeeper-turned-union organizer, took her seat<\/a> on the nonpartisan Phoenix City Council alongside Garcia. Raquel Ter\u00e1n, the former Arizona director for the civic engagement organization Mi Familia Vota, joined the state House of Representatives as a Democrat. On Tuesday, Regina Romero, a child of Mexican immigrants who was the first woman elected to the Tucson City Council, became that city\u2019s first Latina mayor. To replace her on the council, voters chose Lane Santa Cruz, who grew up in one of the poorest and most heavily Hispanic corners of Tucson and, armed with a Ph.D. in education, worked for more than 10 years as an advocate for her neighbors, many of them undocumented as her parents once were. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Left: Former Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio. Right: Former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Arizona,long considered the home base of tough-minded Western conservatism, has been drifting leftward<\/a> for a few years now. In 2012, the Supreme Court significantly weakened<\/a> the \u201cshow me your papers\u201d law. Brewer left office in 2014, and in 2016, Arpaio was voted out and escaped prison only because Trump pardoned<\/a> him a year later, after he was found guilty of contempt for defying a federal judge\u2019s orders to stop singling out Latinos. (At 87, Arpaio is running for sheriff<\/a> in Maricopa County again, but his candidacy is considered a long shot.) The state\u2019s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, has publicly rejected<\/a> Trump\u2019s idea of denying green cards to people who receive government benefits and questioned recent immigration raids in Mississippi food-processing plants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet this new wave of Latino politicians represents another shift in \nArizona politics. While Arizona has had a number of Latino politicians \nbefore, this new group has emerged specifically from the statewide push \nagainst undocumented immigrants. They have moved past the well-worn \nformula of increasing Latino participation in elections, though that too\n is part of their strategy. They\u2019re building on their activism\u2014protests,\n civil disobedience, grassroots organizing\u2014to enter the halls of \npolitical power, and doing so largely without help from the Democratic \nParty. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is about stepping into the electoral space and saying, \u2018Hey, \nnot only can we put pressure from the outside, but we can infiltrate \nthese systems and do something radically different,\u2019\u201d Santa Cruz says. \n\u201cIt sounds very subversive, but it is not. This is the way through the \nfront door.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their arrival hasn\u2019t come without challenges. They have struggled to \nfind middle ground between their in-your-face style of activism and the \nmore measured ways that are necessary to build alliances. They remain \nthe targets of the anti-immigrant sentiment in Arizona, where Trump has a\n loyal base of supporters. Even in the Democratic stronghold of Tucson, \nthere were signs on Tuesday that voters are willing to go only so far: A\n proposal to designate it a sanctuary city was soundly rejected at the \npolls, in part because many feared the designation could invite \nretaliation from the Trump administration and the Republican majority in\n the state Legislature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur goal is to at least dismantle this system that was created to hurt our people and to get rid of us, and that takes time,\u201d Garcia says. \u201cBut brown people are coming out, and now we have the numbers and the organization in place to be able to turn the tables in our favor exactly because we have a seat at the table.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Standing in the dappled shade of a palo verde tree, Phoenix City Councilman Carlos Garcia, at center in red, speaks to supporters during a fundraiser for Lane Santa Cruz, who would soon be elected to the Tucson City Council. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mexicans and, later, immigrants <\/strong>from other parts of Latin \nAmerica have played important roles in Arizona\u2019s development. They \nworked on the system of canals that delivered a steady supply of water \nto farmers and, today, plant and harvest greens along the border to feed\n most of the United States<\/a>\n in the winter. They dug the desert to carve out the streets of Phoenix \nand, now, build the high-rises that are transforming this city\u2019s \nskyline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Latinos, however, have long struggled for equal access and equal rights in Arizona. Their resistance took shape in the labor unions that opposed legislation in 1914 threatening to ban non-English speakers from working in mines, and then a dual-wage system that paid Mexicans less for doing the same work as Anglos. It manifested itself in court, when, three years before Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>, Latino leaders in the city of Tolleson, then a farming outpost west of Phoenix, successfully defeated Anglo school officials who believed Mexican Americans were inferior and, because of that, deserved to be segregated from white students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cThe State of Latino Arizona,\u201d a report published in 2009, \nChristine Mar\u00edn, a historian, archivist and professor emerita at Arizona\n State University, writes about these early generations of activists \nwho, in the late 1800s and early 1990s, mobilized in groups with names \nlike \u201cEl Centro Radical Mexicano\u201d (The Mexican Radical Center); \u201cLiga \nProtectora Latina\u201d (Latino Protective League); and \u201cLos Conquistadores\u201d \n(The Conquerors).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Decades later, in 1969, Congressman Ra\u00fal Grijalva, then a college \nstudent at the University of Arizona, co-founded the Mexican American \nLiberation Committee, which organized school walkouts in Phoenix and \nTucson to protest overcrowding and the absence of bilingual classes and \ncourses on Mexican culture. \u201cWe were fighting for equity. We were \nfighting for our identities, fighting to give our community power to \nchange our lives,\u201d says Grijalva, a Democrat from Tucson, where he was \nthe first Latino to serve on a school board. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The defiance that grew out of the Brewer-and-Arpaio era represents a new chapter in the history of Latino activism in Arizona. Some 15 years ago, anger over illegal immigration rose in the state, fueled by the record number of migrants apprehended along the border. Activists like Garcia trained their focus away from Washington, weaving together a network of local organizations that taught the people whose lives were affected by Arizona\u2019s heavy-handed enforcement how to fight back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Councilwoman Regina Romero takes a swing through the \u201cTucson Meet Yourself\u201d festival in October while campaigning for mayor. In November, Romero, the daughter of migrant farmworkers and the first woman elected to the Tucson City Council, was elected mayor. She will be the first Latina to hold the office. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Groups like Garcia\u2019s Puente, founded in 2007 in response<\/a> to an agreement allowing Arpaio\u2019s deputies to act as federal immigration agents, held weekly classes to teach undocumented immigrants what to do if they were stopped by the police. Lucha\u2014which stands for Living United for Change in Arizona and means \u201cstruggle\u201d in Spanish\u2014trained teenagers who had lost a parent to deportation to use their stories to get voters on their side. In Tucson, volunteers created \u201credes de protecci\u00f3n,\u201d or safety nets, for people who needed money to post bail for detained relatives or for child care if they were detained themselves. Their advocacy contributed to the voter-approved expansion of worker protection laws in 2016, which included the largest minimum-wage increase in the country, and legally mandated paid sick days for all employees in the state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, these activists say, they want to move past opposing those who \nhave opposed them, and to be defined by the positive changes they make. \nThey\u2019ve worked on that together, counting on the same coalitions of \ngrassroots groups that registered record number of Latinos ahead of the \nlast presidential election, carrying out voter mobilization drives and \nspreading the word on issues of common interest, such as workers\u2019 \nrights, better schools and safer neighborhoods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat really woke us up as a community were the anti-immigrant laws \nhere in Arizona, and it was Arpaio, and it was Jan Brewer, and it was \nthose anti-immigrant policies that they were pushing\u2014that\u2019s what took us\n to the streets,\u201d says Romero of Tucson, who grew up speaking English \nand Spanish in the rural city of Somerton, near where Arizona meets \nMexico and California. \u201cBut we also realized that if we wanted to change\n the systems that have oppressed us, we had to do it from the inside. We\n had to change the faces of these policymakers in Arizona.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They ran their political campaigns as they ran their grassroots \ngroups, drafting people into leadership positions who didn\u2019t have much \npolitical experience but did have knowledge of communities and the \nissues they face. Some, like Santa Cruz, are alumni of New American Leaders<\/a>,\n a national program that prepares children and grandchildren of \nimmigrants for elected office; Ter\u00e1n has been an instructor there. As \ncandidates, they joined forces to knock on doors and raise money in \ncommunities that are not often the targets of establishment politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And they rode into office over the past year by building on the \nsuccess of the yearslong efforts at voter mobilization that followed SB \n1070. According to a report<\/a>\n released earlier this year by the Latino Vote Project, a network of \nadvocacy groups, 75 percent of Latino voters in Arizona cast their \nballots for a Democrat in 2018, a 22-point increase from 2014, which \nhelped to tip the political scales in Arizona to the left at the \nnational, state and local level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe point isn\u2019t just winning. It\u2019s what we do after, and that\u2019s on all of us,\u201d says Marisa Franco, co-founder of Mijente, an online organizing platform that has its roots on the anti-immigrant battles in Arizona. \u201cBut we\u2019re actually starting to lay tracks of an alternative direction, an alternative way forward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arizona is changing fast. <\/strong>One in three of its residents is \nLatino, and Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of its population, \nputting the state on track to become majority-minority by 2030<\/a>, 15 years ahead of the rest of the country. Latinos are already the majority<\/a>\n in Arizona\u2019s public schools, which are also among the poorest \nperforming schools in the country. That\u2019s one of the state\u2019s biggest \ntests for the future: how to prepare the next generation of Latino \nleaders if the institutions that serve them are flawed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this new cadre of Latino elected officials is finally in the position to make laws and ordinances to improve the lives of fellow immigrants and children of immigrants, they say they\u2019re finding it\u2019s a lot harder to push the same issues now that they\u2019re in power because they\u2019re not yet fully trusted: Voters who put them in office are wary that they will forget where they came from now that they\u2019re in politics, and their colleagues see them as potential adversaries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the meeting that brought a semi-dressed-up Garcia to the council\u2019s\n chambers last month, council members had convened to consider a \ncivilian oversight board for the Phoenix Police Department, whose \nofficers fired on more people<\/a>\n than officers from any other police force in the United States last \nyear. Increasing accountability among local police is the issue Garcia \nmost aggressively campaigned on, a stance that the city\u2019s powerful \npolice union has taken as a deliberate act of defiance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Garcia wore a T-shirt that read \u201cEnd Police Brutality\u201d in June, the union posted<\/a>\n on its Facebook page a picture of his arrest during an immigrant \nrights\u2019 protest in 2017 and asked, \u201cDoes he serve the best interests of \nthe people who reside in the nation\u2019s fifth largest and fastest growing \ncity?\u201d When he traveled to El Paso, Texas, last week, the union used his\n own Facebook Live feed to question his commitment to his constituents. A\n few weeks ago, Garcia was criticized\u2014not just by the union, but also by\n plenty of online commenters\u2014for confronting a pair of Arizona State \nUniversity police officers who had pulled him over on the edge of the \ncampus, telling him that the license plate of the car he was driving had\n been suspended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t believe you have jurisdiction,\u201d Garcia said before handing \nthe officers his driver\u2019s license and asking them to hurry because he \nhad a meeting to go to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the council meeting<\/a>, Garcia squeezed his lips as he listenedto\n his colleague Sal DiCiccio, a build-the-wall kind of Trump supporter \nwho is the most conservative voice in the council. \u201cThere\u2019s a perception\n among some that our police officers are bad when I don\u2019t believe that \nthat\u2019s true,\u201d DiCiccio said. \u201cI think that our police officers have done\n everything admirably well. They\u2019re just amazing individuals, and quite \nfrankly there\u2019s just a lot of B.S. that\u2019s happening toward them right \nnow. And I think that\u2019s just wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have a very different understanding of where we\u2019re at,\u201d Garcia retorted. \u201cI believe we\u2019re already in that crisis of confidence.\u201d Garcia was measured in his tone. He seemed to be struggling to find the right approach to building partnerships that don\u2019t compromise his convictions. (This month, the council will meet again on the oversight board, this time to hear community input.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Lane Santa Cruz, who grew up in one of the poorest and most heavily Hispanic corners of Tucson and, armed with a Ph.D. in education, worked for more than 10 years as an advocate for her neighbors, was elected to Tucson City Council on November 5. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One thing these activists-turned politicians don\u2019t want to be is one-offs. They\u2019re trying to create political roots by hiring people like Adriana Garcia Maximiliano, a once-undocumented immigrant from Mexico who trained first- and second-generation Americans to run for office and is now, at age 27, Carlos Garcia\u2019s policy director. They want to change the face of Arizona\u2019s politics much as the growth of the Latino population is inevitably changing the face of the state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One Sunday morning this fall, Maximiliano stood under a Palo Verde \ntree, one of 20-some Latino and black activists who had gathered to \nraise money for Santa Cruz at the home of Marisa Franco. The \nget-together was more neighborhood party than fundraiser\u2014these were \nlongtime friends, united by a shared heritage and common goal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a blood-red shirt adorned by colorful indigenous crosses, a tattoo\n of the brother she lost to a drug overdose covering her right arm, \nSanta Cruz listened as, one by one, people gave her the reasons they \nwere behind her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Franco: \u201cWe need to have people like you that are strong and willing to take positions that are best for our communities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maximiliano: \u201cWe do need a lot of folks who are willing to change shit up and do things differently.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ter\u00e1n: \u201cI\u2019m here because the state is changing, and as the state changes, we don\u2019t have time to have imperfect allies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came Garcia, who was wearing a crimson T-shirt with a picture of\n the Tejano superstar Selena. He and Santa Cruz went to the same high \nschool in Tucson. \u201cI was a little gangster,\u201d he said, \u201cgetting into a \nlot of trouble. Lane was a tennis rock star, big in her church.\u201d They \nreunited in college, when both of them joined MEChA, a Mexican-American \nstudent group founded in the turbulent 1960s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe raised our families together, talked about organizing together,\u201d \nhe said. \u201cAnd now in the very lonely world of running for office and \ngoverning, I think it\u2019s a privilege to have someone like you, Lane, to \nshare this space with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Tuesday, they celebrated her victory together. \u201cNow,\u201d Garcia says, \u201cwe have work to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fernanda Santos is a journalist and professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, the state was known for its harsh immigration laws. But a new crop of Latino activists emerged in response—and now they’re catapulting themselves into elected office. by Fernanda Santos In the City […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,70],"tags":[84,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-13382","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-slider-16","8":"category-latino-vote","9":"tag-arizona","10":"tag-latino-vote"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13382"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13859,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13382\/revisions\/13859"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}