Arizona's Anglo Insecurity

[Ed Barrow]

It's easy to assume that Arizona has become the epicenter in the battle against illegal immigration primarily because it has one of the highest percentages of undocumented migrants of any state in the union. But that's just half the story behind the fear many white Arizonans evidently feel.

Arizona is something of a transient culture. "Post-ethnic" white transplants drove its population growth — particularly in recent decades — newcomers who had long since passed through the crucible of suburbanization and left behind the "home country" identities of their forebears. The leap by these Midwesterners or Californians to Arizona was another step beyond that.

...

And make no mistake, the coming of Anglos meant the delegitimizing of other cultures in the Arizona Territory. In the early 1900s, during Arizona's struggle for statehood, its representatives had to prove to Washington that it was, in essence, white enough to enter the union.

Because of the large presence of non-Anglos, Indiana Sen. Albert Beveridge, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, argued that the federal government should view Arizona as it would an overseas possession. To avoid its becoming like "the Negro section of the South," he wanted Arizona to be managed the same way as the Philippines.

To counter such bias, proponents of statehood assured Washington that Anglo transplants dominated the territory politically and culturally. In 1902, congressional delegate Mark Smith declared that what made Arizona different from — read: more worthy than — New Mexico was that most people in the territory were non-natives: They came "fully grown from the different states of the union."

When it was time to write a constitution, this logic was made explicit, and non-Anglos were relegated to second-class status. The struggle for statehood had honed a clear notion of what constituted the preferred Arizonan. As historian Eric V. Meeks has written, "Racial inequality was not simply an unfortunate corollary to full statehood; it was built into the very identity of Arizona from its inception."

The echoes of that resound in the state's adoption of a "present your papers" law, as well as its ban of voluntary K-12 ethnic studies. It's hard not to see the whole outburst as a simple expression of white cultural insecurity. And 98 years after the territory became a state, the nasty campaign against illegal immigrants suggests that Anglo Arizonans' identity is still driven less by who they are than by who they are not.




http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rodriguez-arizona-20100524,0,2142078.column

[fascisthunter]

1. I Think That's What this Really Comes Down to

for many of them at least.

[knixphan]

3. agreed.

[Xipe Totec]

2. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

In 1904, a group of New York nuns delivered 40 mostly Irish but entirely Catholic orphans to a remote Arizona mining town to be adopted by local Catholics. What happened next is the subject of historian Linda Gordon's compelling new book: For their act of Christian charity, the nuns were rewarded with near-lynching and public vilification of an intensity hard to fathom today.

As Gordon makes clear in writing so alive that it makes the reader smell sagebrush and white supremacy, the Eastern nuns didn't realize that, in turn-of-the-century Arizona, Catholic also meant Mexican, and Mexican meant inferior. How could a dirty, amoral Mexican (terms that were among the nicer descriptions of the would-be foster parents in newspaper accounts and sworn testimony) raise a white child? To Western whites, the nuns were depraved white-slavers selling children to drunken-whore savages.


Local whites (nearly all Protestant, and therefore ineligible to receive the sisters' charges) rioted and "liberated" the children from their Mexican foster parents, all of whom had been carefully vetted by the local (white) priest in accordance with the Sisters of Charity's well-established system. Many white Arizonans concocted stories claiming they'd seen Mexicans pay a priest on receipt of a child, or claiming that the sisters promised them children if they'd ante up. As Gordon plausibly sees it, these manufactured memories helped them to make sense of why another white would deliver helpless white children to the clutches of near-animals -- and also legitimized their "rescue" of the children.

The sisters sued to win back the children, promising that they'd be placed with Catholic, and -- having learned their lesson -- white parents. Indeed, the sisters abandoned the Mexicans entirely, claiming they would have never given the children to them had they "known." Interestingly, the suits were all civil; no criminal charges were ever entertained, let alone filed, against the vigilantes, although they were kidnappers whose treatment of the sisters and the Mexicans was brutal. When the mob first came for the sisters to "voluntarily" give up the children, 100 people crowded into their hotel lobby, with 300 more outside threatening the nuns with tar and feathers. Many were armed, and several called for a rope.

"In the street a sheriff sat on horseback, with a revolver, like the other men," one sister later wrote. "Women called us vile names, and some of them put pistols to our heads. They said there was no law in that town; that they made their own laws. We were told to get the children from the Spaniards ... If we did not we would be killed."


http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/12/13/gordon/print.html

[Demeter]

4. Jesus Wept

Waiter, I think I'm in the Wrong Nation....