10 years ago, Arizona changed how we talk about immigration
UCSON, ARIZ.
The heat in the Sonoran Desert neared 100 degrees on the day several years ago when Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint pulled over an elderly Hispanic man, dressed in a tailored suit.
They ordered him out of his vehicle and requested his identity papers, which showed he was a Mexicanborn immigrant named Raúl H. Castro. He had turned 96 that very day.
Ana Doan, a longtime friend who was driving him to a birthday celebration in Tucson, pleaded without success to be allowed to give him some water.
“I was screaming at the agents, telling them they were holding the former governor of the state of Arizona,” she said.
Born in 1916 in northern Mexico into a povertystricken family that crossed the border when he was a child, Castro was elected Arizona’s first and only Latino governor in 1974, the pinnacle of an exceptional political career that seems nearly unimaginable to replicate in today’s Arizona.
Since Castro’s historic victory 46 years ago, no Latino has been elected to any statewide office in Arizona, much less as governor. Instead, Arizona turned into a testing ground for policies aimed at keeping foreigners out and curbing the influence of Latinos in American politics —– policies that helped lay the groundwork for anti-immigrant measures in other states and in the Trump White House.
Ten years ago this spring, Arizona’s leaders enacted one of the most contentious anti-immigration bills that any state has adopted in recent history: SB 1070, the first of the so-called “show me your papers” laws, which gave Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County and other local police officers broad power to detain anyone without a warrant if they suspected they had committed a deportable offense.
The state also required employers to screen out undocumented workers,
ARIZONA IS A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR THE REST OF THE UNITED STATES.
Lisa Urias, Phoenix businesswoman
disqualified undocumented immigrants from instate tuition rates and introduced barriers making it harder for Latinos to vote. Even now, states around the country are implementing laws that mirror Arizona’s earlier attempts to limit immigration.
But the tangled politics of immigration in Arizona have become more unpredictable, and even some Republicans and independents in the state are rejecting the divisive politics of the past 20 years — suggesting that President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies may not find the widespread approval in Arizona they once might have.
The story of Arizona’s turbulent evolution on immigration — from Raúl Castro to Joe Arpaio to the election in 2018 of Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, to the U.S. Senate — provides a fascinating lesson in the history of the Southwest and, possibly, the future of the Democratic Party as it challenges Republican supremacy in traditional strongholds.
“Arizona is a cautionary tale for the rest of the United States,” said Lisa Urias, a Phoenix businesswoman who lived through Arizona’s fraught plunge into state-sponsored nativism. “It’s extremely troubling that we’re now repeating, front and center on the national stage, a painful chapter in Arizona history.”
Castro was an unlikely candidate in Arizona. While a large Hispanic population maintained some influence in New Mexico, Arizona from the start was a place where Anglos held the levers of power.
After statehood in 1912, officials enacted a poll tax aimed at preventing Hispanics from voting. Until the 1960s, elected leaders like Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, sought to prevent Spanishspeaking citizens from voting by requiring English-literacy tests.
Castro scavenged for food as a child after his family crossed the border. He survived as a hobo during the Great Depression before returning to Arizona, where he chafed at the segregation that relegated Hispanics to inferior status. Castro went on to become a prosecutor, judge and ambassador — unprecedented for a Mexican immigrant in the state.
When he ran for governor in 1974, he cultivated ties to prominent Republicans and courted liberals by supporting anti-poverty spending and women’s rights. After campaigning in places neglected by Republicans, especially in remote areas of the Navajo Nation, he won a razorthin victory.
But to the dismay of his supporters, Castro served just two years before accepting President Jimmy Carter’s nomination as ambassador to Argentina in 1977.