Lead, Follow, Or Get out of the Way? Arizona History and the Nation

Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? Arizona History and the Nation

Katherine Benton-Cohen

Journal of Arizona History, Volume 61, Numbers 3&4, Autumn/Winter 2020, pp. 667-692 (Article)

Published by Arizona Historical Society

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/775442

[ Access provided at 10 Feb 2021 18:50 GMT from Arizona Historical Society ] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? Arizona History and the Nation

By Katherine Benton-Cohen

n one of my favorite children’s books, Gila Monsters Meet You at I the Airport, the young narrator describes his reluctant move to the West from New York City.1 “Out West,” he fears, “nobody plays baseball because they’re too busy chasing buffaloes . . . there’s cac- tus everywhere you look. . . . Out West, everybody grows up to be a sheriff. I want to be a subway driver.” Worst of all, says his best friend Seymour, “Gila monsters meet you at the airport.” Soon, though, our narrator’s plane touches (desert) ground at a seem- ingly lizard-less western airport. There he meets his counterpart, a young western boy moving east: “He looks like Seymour, but I know his name is Tex.” “Tex” fears the East, where he is sure “the streets are full of gangsters,” “it snows and blows all the time,” and “alligators live in the sewers.” En route to his new house (who knew they had taxis Out West?!), the narrator sees restaurants and baseball fields, kids on bikes—and, yes, a horse. It turns out life Out West looks famil- iar. On the last page, he reports that he will write “a long letter to Seymour. I’ll tell him I’m sending it by pony express. Seymour will believe me. Back East they don’t know much about us westerners.”2 Like John Ford scenes of Monument Valley, the illustrations of the book, with their saguaro cacti and Gila monsters, are clearly

1 The author wishes to thank readers Stephen Aron, Samuel Truett, and Thomas E. Sheridan, as well as the close guidance and patience of editors David Turpie and Katherine Morrissey. 2 Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport (New York, 1980).

KATHERINE BENTON-COHEN is a professor of history at Georgetown University. She is the author of two books, including Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (2009).

JOURNAL OF ARIZONA HISTORY [667] VOL. 61, NOS. 3&4 (AUTUMN/WINTER 2020) the journal of arizona history set in Arizona, even if they stand for “Out West.” The 1980 book is partly autobiographical. Author Marjorie Weinman Sharmat moved from Manhattan to Tucson in 1975 with her husband and teenaged sons. She even lent her own address to the young narrator’s (165 E. 95th Street). The picture book pokes gentle fun at regional stereotypes, even as it acknowledges that a few have some truth (some kids do wear cowboy hats, there are horses, and in the East the subway is crowded). In the process, her book shows how Arizona is both like and unlike other parts of the country. Equally important, it recognizes that New York City is just as weird, if not weirder, than Arizona.3 One might ask, is Arizona a part of a whole, a leader or a follower, a fish out of water, or a pea in a pod? Do Gila monsters meet you at the airport?

* * * * * In spite of my light-hearted opening, serious concerns motivate what follows. As I write, academic and public debates rage about immigration and the border, conservative politics, Indigenous rights, and environmental issues. In this essay, I offer some thoughts about Arizona’s relationship to the West and to the nation, and how these relationships have changed over time. I pay special attention to how and which academic historians, presses, and audiences have produced or paid attention to Arizona history. In what follows, I first consider Arizona’s place in historical writing about the West and the nation (with the caveat that my own knowledge and cover- age by other authors in this volume tilt my historiographical analysis toward southern Arizona). I compare Arizona to other parts of the West—especially New Mexico―to provide context for my larger generalizations, which come from my own position as what one might call an “insider-outsider,” as an Arizona native and historian who visits often but has not lived permanently in the state in three decades. I briefly examine how Arizona’s demographics and economic indicators have changed over time. This is the context for considering new controversies over immigration and border policy, especially the advent and aftermath of 2010’s SB 1070, 3 On Sharmat, see https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Gila-Monsters-Meet- You-at-the-Airport/Marjorie-Weinman-Sharmat/9780689713835 (accessed September 4, 2020). For a thoughtful meditation on the creation of an “East” to complement a “West,” see Flannery Burke, “The Arrogance of the East: How Westerners Created a Region,” West- ern Historical Quarterly 49 (Winter 2018): 383‒407.

[668] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? the state legislation (much of it since invalidated) intended to crack down on undocumented immigration. In short, what do I think Arizona’s relationship is to the rest of the country? What I suspect is not surprising: Arizona is becoming more like the nation, and the nation is becoming more like Arizona. These tendencies mean, in my view, that Arizona history deserves more attention than ever from historians and academic presses.

The History and the Myths: Arizona and Historiography In 1934, Utah native and Harper’s Monthly columnist Bernard DeVoto labeled the American West the “plundered province.” The idea, he admitted, was not entirely his, but the name stuck. In January 1947, he reprised the essay, writing, “economically the West has always been a province of the East and it has always been plundered.” DeVoto used as one example among many the attempts to take “ten or twelve million acres in Arizona and New Mexico” out of the public domain and sell them to private lumber and cattle interests. Historians have emphasized the American West’s out- sized and ambivalent relationship with the federal government.4 Likewise, political scientists who study the rise of the Sunbelt region identify the role of the federal government in its rise as one of its three central characteristics.5 In 1991, Richard White called the American West the federal state’s “kindergarten.” White notes, “Federal ownership of the public domain gave the central government a distinctive permanent presence in the West,” while “an equally obvious governmental presence came through the territorial system.”6 (Arizona was part of the United States for sixty-four years before attaining statehood.) Depending on one’s perspective, the federal government’s role in this “plundering” can go either way—as taker or savior. In DeVoto’s mind, federal landownership was a defense against

4 Bernard DeVoto, “The West: Plundered Province,” Harper’s, August 1934, pp. 355‒64; Bernard DeVoto, “The West against Itself,” Harper’s, January 1947, pp. 1‒13. On the other hand, it is his only mention of Arizona in the article. The postwar year 1947 was timely, as in retrospect—and even at the time—it became clear that the West was changing and growing rapidly. Both essays can be found in Bernard DeVoto, The Western Paradox: A Conservation Reader, ed. Douglas Brinkley and Patrician Nelson Limerick (New Haven, Conn., 2001). 5 See Rachel M. Guberman, “Is There a Sunbelt After All? And Should We Care?” Journal of Urban History 41 (Nov. 2015): 1167. 6 Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1991), 158, 154.

[669] the journal of arizona history rapacious private interests. For many Arizonans and outside busi- ness interests, it was an unnecessary and perhaps unconstitutional infringement on free enterprise. But there’s an internal colonialism point of view, too; historian Andrew Needham has argued that coal-fired power production turned the Colorado River Plateau into an internal “plundered province” of the city of Phoenix.7 Modern Arizona would not exist without the largesse of the federal government. It prosecuted the Indian Wars on white settlers’ behalf, administered hundreds of thousands of acres of Indian lands, financed huge reclamation projects under the Newlands Act (Salt River Project was one of its first, whose dams now provide water to the fifth-largest metropolitan center in the United States), and it expanded defense industries and bases in the post‒World War II era, including Fort Huachuca (dating to the Indian Wars) and Davis- Monthan, Williams, and Luke Air Force bases, which helped create modern Tucson and the Phoenix suburbs. Federally funded interstate highways linked Arizona’s major municipal areas in a north-south and east-west orientation that continues to shape development— from Flagstaff to Phoenix to Tucson to Nogales and with I-40 moving east-west to link northern Arizona with the intermountain region. Arizona’s large amount of federal land typifies this distinctive feature of the American West.8 In 2018 the thirteen states with the highest percentage of federal land were all in the American West. Arizona ranked eighth. Nearly 39 percent of its land—more than twenty-eight million acres—belongs to the federal government, and these figures do not include Indian reservations, which occupy 27.1 percent of Arizona and would thus significantly raise the state’s ranking. More than 80 percent of the state’s federal land is split almost evenly between the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. All told, only about 18 percent of Arizona land is privately owned. Still, as the sixth largest state geographi- cally (114,000 square miles), that still leaves a lot of private land.9

7 DeVoto, “The West against Itself,” in Western Paradox, 94; Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, N.J., 2014), 154. 8 Conflict over federal control of land is often central to a western conservative politics. 9 Carol Hardy Vincent, Laura A. Hanson, and Carla N. Argueta, “Federal Land Owner- ship: Overview and Data,” Congressional Research Service, updated February 21, 2020, available online at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42346.pdf (accessed September 4, 2020). These statistics refer only to land administered by the Bureau of Land Manage- ment, the Forest Service, the Federal Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Department of Defense, and do not include the Department of Energy or Indian reserva-

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If anything, numbers underestimate the historical relationship between the federal government and Arizona. As the forty-eighth state, Arizona was under federal control as a territory from 1848 to February 1912, longer than any other current state besides Alaska and Hawaii. Moreover, the federal government actually owned 18 percent less land in 2018 than it did in 1990.10 DeVoto was mostly talking about private plunderers in his “plundered province” essay. Arizona, where the vaunted four Cs― copper, cattle, citrus, and cotton―all relied on large capitalist enter- prises (especially copper) was a perfect case. As DeVoto noted in 1934, the “unending stream of gold and silver and copper” of the mountain states “has not made the West wealthy. It has, to be brief, made the East wealthy.”11 Nowhere is that truer than in Arizona, where silver and copper strikes spurred most of its population growth before World War II. By 1910, Arizona produced more copper than any state in the union, a status it has not relinquished. Even with the steep decline in the mining industry, it still ranks sec- ond in the nation for overall mineral production.12 Like several other western states, for much of its history, Arizona was largely controlled by one corporation. Where Montana had its Anaconda, southern Colorado its Guggenheims, and North Dakota the Northern Pacific Railway, Arizona had the Phelps Dodge Corporation (PD). In 1917, the company crushed a nascent radical union movement with its role in the removal of over 1,200 men from Bisbee during a strike by the Industrial Workers of the World.13 The copper from PD’s “plundered province” funded philanthropy in tions. For the study, the authors included eleven western states: Arizona, California, Colo- rado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Many scholars would add Hawaii and Alaska, which both have large percentages of federal land. New Hampshire, ranked fourteenth, is home to Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation of the White Mountains, a model and precedent for federal conservation in the American West. Julia Shumway, “Fact Check: Gosar Correct on Private Land in Ariz,” Arizona Republic (Phoenix), April 13, 2015, available online at https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/ politics/fact-check/2015/04/13/fact-check-gosar-correct-private-land-arizona/25740527/ (accessed June 23, 2020). 10 Vincent, Hanson, and Argueta, “Federal Land Ownership.” 11 DeVoto, “The West,” in The Western Paradox, 9. 12 “The Top 5 Mineral-Producing States,” United States Geological Survey report, April 14, 2017, available online at https://www.usgs.gov/news/top-5-mineral-producing-states (accessed June 23, 2020). 13 On the Bisbee Deportation, see inter alia James Byrkit, Forging the Copper Collar: Ari- zona’s Labor-Management War of 1901‒1922 (Tucson, 1982); and Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).

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Of all of the famed Cs of Arizona, copper was dominant in the early twentieth century. The Bisbee Deportation of July 1917 made national news at the time and is the subject of the recent film Bisbee’17. AHF Subject Photograph Collection, FP-FPC 100 B44/F5, Arizona Historical Society, Tempe.

Arizona. But the lion’s share of the profits bankrolled the baronial lifestyles of corporate leaders and Phelps Dodge family members, as well as large bequests to cultural institutions from which Arizona miners would never benefit, including Princeton and Columbia universities, American University of Beirut, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the New York Museum of Natural History.14 As Megan Black has shown, in concert with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Phelps Dodge used its work in Arizona to promote copper mining across the developing world. Two films produced by PD and the Department of the Interior’s Motion Picture Division―A Story of Copper (1953) and Arizona and Its Natural Resources (1955)― framed the company’s mineral production in Arizona as the modern antidote to “ancient” Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican primitivism.15

14 The history of Phelps-Dodge is the subject of my current research project; see also the recent article by Emma Teitelman, “The Properties of Capitalism: Industrial Enclosures in the South and the West after the American Civil War,” Journal of American History 106 (March 2020): 879‒900. 15 Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), 133‒35. See “Uses of Copper”(1962), available online at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=CbdbNtGM2v4; and “Copper Mining in Arizona” (n.d.), available

[672] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way?

The company also sponsored a series of historical documentaries for Arizona public television—literally creating the state’s dominant historical narrative, one which celebrated colonialism and made Native American life seem quaint.16 As late as the 1980s, when the company won a bitter strike against the U.S. Steelworkers union, which represented the copper miners, the company’s chief lobbyist was ever-present in Arizona congressional offices, and the company still vetted budget proposals in the state legislature.17

* * * * * What have historians had to say about all this? Until recently, not much, as far as historians outside Arizona go.18 In Arizona, where state history was required in my elementary, middle, and high school curriculum in the 1980s, what I learned was dust-dry; mostly I remember learning about Spanish conquistadors, for whom two rival high schools were named. I had no interest in Arizona history until I went East for college. In the early 1990s, the swell of the so-called “New Western History” was rising.19 Even so, few materials on Arizona history were published outside the state. After the hoopla a century earlier about Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis, and a mid- century uptick of interest in the field engendered by the expansion of western universities (and the creation of the Western History Association in 1961), many U.S. historians paid scant attention to the West in general. By the late 1980s, however, the New Western online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXn0DE149kk&t=48s (accessed July 12, 2020). 16 Phelps Dodge was purchased by Freeport McMoRan in 2007. In the 1960s, Phelps Dodge produced a number of thirty-minute documentaries on various Arizona topics (on astronomy, archaeology, Padre Eusebio Kino, the Hopis, et alia), with KOOL-TV, an Ari- zona CBS affiliate. A list can be found at “Document Resume,” available online at https:// files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED119938.pdf (accessed July 17, 2020). 17 A former state legislator told me this after a screening of Bisbee’17 in Scottsdale in October 2018. For more on Phelps Dodge and Arizona, see Linda Gordon, The Great Ari- zona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); and Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans. On the 1980s strike, see Jonathan D. Rosenblum, Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995); and Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989; repr., 1996). 18 For an earlier version of my argument, see Borderline Americans, 9‒13. 19 Alan Brinkley, “The Western Historians: Don’t Fence Them In,” New York Times, Sep- tember 20, 1992, p. 1, a review of Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence, Kans., 1991) and Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York, 1993).

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History attracted national attention, no doubt in part because many of its adherents worked or had trained at Yale University.20 It did not hurt when three of its prominent practitioners, William Cronon, Richard White, and Patricia Limerick, won MacArthur “genius” grants.21 These laurels—and assumptions about the revisionists’ left- leaning politics—did not endear the New Western History to all westerners. It is well known that westerners (especially white male ones) have participated in the myth-making about the region as much as if not more so than outsiders. In 1989, one Arizonan said as much: “why can’t the revisionists just leave our myths alone?”22 That this remark came from an opinion-page editor in the Arizona Republic—not, say, a tourist or souvenir vendor at Old Tucson or along Route 66—gives some idea of the depth of the commitment to western mythology. That commitment to a white western mythology has extended to archival collection practices in Arizona, where a recent survey found that at most 2 percent of the sources represent the experience of people of color and/ or the LGBTQ community.23 Even after the flashy arrival of the New Western History, outside of Yale the history of the West remained an oddity in the East. In 1994, when I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University on Anglo women in the Arizona Territory, my adviser, Stephen Aron, then a young assistant professor with a PhD from the University of California‒Berkeley, warned me it might not be taken seriously by the rest of the faculty.24 That proved untrue,

20 Patricia Nelson Limerick’s trail-blazing The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987), was first published in 1987. 21 Cronon won in 1985, Limerick and White in 1995. In addition, Ramón Gutierrez won in 1983 and Arizona State University environmental historian Stephen Pyne in 1998. More recently, Kelly Lytle Hernández won in 2019 and Natalia Molina in 2020. See MacArthur Foundation website, https://www.macfound.org/fellows/search/all (accessed October 17, 2020). 22 Phil Sunkel, “Some Old West Advice for New-Wave Historians: Go East,” Arizona Repub- lic, October 23, 1989, p A10, quoted in Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The Trail to Santa Fe: The Unleashing of the Western Public Intellectual,” in Limerick, Milner II, and Rankin, eds., Trails, 87. 23 “Community-driven archivist named 2020 ‘Mover and Shaker,’” ASU Now, May 7, 2020, available online at https://asunow.asu.edu/20200507-community-archivist-named- 2020-mover-and-shaker (accessed September 2, 2020). The study of archives can be found on the Arizona Archives Matrix website, https://azarchivesmatrix.org (last accessed Sep- tember 8, 2020). 24 Aron moved to UCLA, is past president of the Western History Association, and will soon be the president and CEO of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles.

[674] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? happily, but my work was notably unusual in a department where we joked that U.S. history only included what you could find along Amtrak’s Northeast corridor. When, thanks to Aron’s mentorship, I began graduate school in 1995 at the University of Wisconsin‒Madison, Arizona history was still a novelty. In the large undergraduate lecture course on immigration history for which I served as teaching assistant, one lecture slide was captioned “Nogales, Texas.” One other Arizonan, Marienka Vanlandingham (née Sokol), a Yale graduate, joined me at Madison, and Oklahoman Marsha Weisiger, with a degree from Arizona State University (ASU), was already working on Diné (Navajo) history. The only other doctoral student I knew who was working on Arizona outside the state was Samuel Truett at Yale, who finished his dissertation in 1997. Rutgers University student Colleen O’Neill worked on Diné women, and Eric Meeks, at the University of Texas, studied race and labor relations in Arizona. All of us had ties to or were born in Arizona.25 These are anecdotal examples, but a survey of the literature backs up the point.26 I searched the database Dissertations and Theses for PhD dissertations with the subject term “American history” and the index term “Arizona.”27 From 1990 to 1999, there were twenty- six listed; twenty of these—76.9 percent—were produced at Arizona’s three universities. In the following decade, 2000‒2009, when the New Western History’s influence peaked, the number had risen to sixty- four. More than half of these—thirty-six—were produced in Arizona (twenty-six of these at ASU; three were from UW‒Madison, one of them mine). From 2010 to 2019, thirty-one “Arizona history” dissertations were recorded, nineteen of them at Arizona universities.28 Even as numbers increased, many—if not most, have not been published as books. Anecdotal evidence points to the decline in academic

25 Monica Perales was soon at Stanford, where she wrote a dissertation about El Paso’s Smeltertown. 26 Arizona State University (ASU) did not offer PhD degrees until the early 1960s. The American Historical Association’s dissertation directory shows a sharp uptick after 1970 of dissertations with the keyword “Arizona” (five before 1970 and seventy-nine afterward!). Search terms of related keywords “Tucson,” “Phoenix,” and “Navajo” found only one—on Tucson―before 1970, but forty-four dissertations on those terms together after 1970. I thank David Turpie for this research. 27 Although other search terms like “borderlands,” “Navajo,” and “Southwest” turn up topics related to Arizona, I was interested in those that explicitly use Arizona as an index term. 28 Proquest Dissertations & Theses, searches conducted September 10, 17, and 18, 2019.

[675] the journal of arizona history publishing in general but also perhaps a lack of access or perceived demand for Arizona topics, especially outside Arizona.29 Scholarly articles show similar patterns. In the database America: History and Life, a collection of 1,700 journals on U.S. and Canadian history, the vast majority of scholarly citations that include “Arizona” are related to anthropology and archaeology, and/or are published in regional journals like the Journal of the Southwest. From 1977 to 2018, eighty-one articles with the subject term “Arizona history” were published in the database’s extensive catalog (compared with 272 on “New Mexico history”).30 I have always maintained that more people study New Mexico because they want research trips to Santa Fe, not Phoenix. For dissertations, though, New Mexico’s statistics do not appear to be terribly different from Arizona’s—I found 136 dissertations in the period from 1990 to 2019. Much of what is in print about Arizona history might be cate- gorized as antiquarian, interested not in big “themes,” but in curio topics like the shootout at the OK Corral. Few events have captured the imagination of Arizona history buffs more than Tombstone— to the bemusement of many academic historians, including those of the American West. The huge research library search engine WorldCat counts 441 print books in English in history fields with keywords “Tombstone” and “Arizona.” Most, although by no means all of these, are from small regional presses (forty-five entries are by local author Ben Traywick). It is a shame that more of the historical work produced by graduate students in Arizona has not been published. To be sure, many historians outside academia do professional and archivally based work.31 And there are a few treatments from academic authors, including Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet’s Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp and Kara McCormack’s analysis of the town’s own self-invention.32

29 Further research is necessary to count how many have been published as books. When I was a graduate student, no Arizona history archive offered fellowships, but now the Arizona Historical Society does. See https://arizonahistoricalsociety.org/research/ research-grants/. 30 To eliminate repetition, I did not include book reviews in my search. 31 Consider Lynn R. Bailey, author of several Arizona history books, who has edited primary sources for his own Westernlore Press for many years. Among the most important for me were Bisbee: Queen of the Copper Camps (1983) and We’ll All Wear Silk Hats: The Erie and Chiricahua Cattle Companies and the Rise of Corporate Ranching in the Sulphur Spring Valley of Arizona (1994). Bailey was also trained as an anthropologist. 32 Steven Lubet, Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp (New Haven, Conn.,

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Tombstone has received disproportionate attention, especially among amateur historians and in the imaginations of history buffs. Main Photograph Collection, Places: Tombstone, Arizona Historical Society, Tempe.

Some historical treatments of Tombstone do pursue broader themes that can point us toward Arizona’s place in the nation. Andrew Isenberg’s Wyatt Earp biography demonstrates what Earp’s life can reveal about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States.33 Other work (including mine) portrays the feud between the McLaury-Clanton gang and the Earp brothers as deeply steeped in partisan and sectional politics of the post‒Civil War era. As com- manding general of the U.S. Army in the early 1880s, General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote privately about the mess made of U.S.‒Mexican relations by cattle rustling and the feud’s violence. Sherman’s correspondence requires a deep dive into federal microfilm—an inconvenience few Earp writers have bothered with (although the role of the American West in the Civil War has now become a thriving and controversial subfield).34

2004); Kara L. McCormack, Imagining Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die (Lawrence, Kans., 2016). Also see Kevin Britz and Roger L. Nichols, Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Recreating the Frontier West (Norman, Okla., 2018); Eric L. Clements, After the Boom in Tombstone and Jerome, Arizona: Decline in Western Resource Towns (Reno, 2003). 33 Andrew Isenberg, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (New York, 2013). 34 On the Civil War‒era West, see, for instance, Stacey Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Free Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013);

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Arizona has barely figured in most historiographical essays and surveys about the region. Carey McWilliams’s classic North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948) called Arizona “the orphan, the pauper of the Spanish provinces.”35 The neglect continued in the historiography. Samuel Truett and Pekka Hämälainen’s 2010 historiographical essay in the Journal of American History on the borderlands mentions Arizona two times, both in geographical terms.36 The few exceptions to Arizona’s exclusion are books on the Southwest specifically, some of which focus solely on Arizona and its statehood twin New Mexico. The most prominent of these surveys include Yale historian Howard Lamar’s The Far Southwest, 1846‒1912 (which covered the four corners states) and Earl Pomeroy’s The American Far West in the Twentieth Century.37 A notable recent addition is Flannery Burke’s A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century, published in 2017 by the University of Arizona Press. Its opening anecdote identifies the feeling of outsiders being “out of place” in the Southwest— something with which the Gila Monsters narrator would agree. Burke also points out the ethnocentrism of the term “Southwest,” which is accurate neither for northern-bound Mexican migrants (that is, those whom the border crossed), nor for Indigenous residents for whom the region has been home for centuries if not millennia.38 I hope Burke’s book will become a standard text in courses on southwestern history. Linda Noel’s recent book on statehood in New Mexico and Arizona compares the political cultures of the neigh- boring states, a popular approach. Arizona, with its long history of racial exclusion and decision to become English-only, contrasted with New Mexico’s recognition of its dual-language history and and Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (New York, 2020), as well as her essay in this issue and her blog post, “Why The Civil War West Mattered and Still Does,” http://www.megankatenelson. com/why-the-civil-war-west-mattered-and-still-does/ (accessed June 19, 2020). 35 Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1948; repr., New York, 1968), 83. 36 Pekka Hämälainen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98 (Sept. 2011): 338‒61. 37 Howard Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846‒1912 (New Haven, Conn., 1966; rev. ed., Albu- querque, 2000); Earl Pomeroy, The American Far West in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn., 2008). 38 Flannery Burke, A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century (Tucson, 2017). See also the essential D. W. Meinig, Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600‒1970 (New York, 1971). I am indebted to my long friendship with Burke, New Mexico native and scholar.

[678] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? heritage, does not come off looking good.39 (In 1948, McWilliams called Arizona Territory “a white buffer zone” created by mostly ex- Confederate Anglo-American settlers).40 Meanwhile, in western history textbooks, Tombstone appears as a symbol of the American West’s myth-making in real time. Its mythology exists beyond and outside the real geography of Arizona, or perhaps even reality—some people do not realize it is a “real” place. The weight of mythology is clear on the Tombstone Chamber of Commerce’s website, which points out, “Tombstone is Three Blocks of History and a Million Miles of Guest Expectations.” A lot of people visit there, but it is unclear how many are from Arizona or outside it.41 Tourism has fallen at the OK Corral as western films— and, for many, the glorification of guns—have fallen out of favor, yet clearly the town is “too tough to die” (or “too stupid,” as one Bisbee resident commented in the 2018 film Bisbee’17).42 In short, the community of academic Arizona historians remains small, as is the number of canonical texts or even ref- erences to the state in U.S. historical writing. Since the 1990s we have relied on Thomas Sheridan’s history of Arizona, and his tal- isman-like Los Tucsonenses, which documented a vital community history project chronicling southern Arizona’s Mexican American heritage.43 Many of us also read A. Yvette Huginnie’s unpublished

39 Linda Noel, Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration (Tucson, 2014). See also Linda C. Noel, “‘I am an American’: Anglos, Mexicans, Nativos, and the National Debate over Arizona and New Mexico Statehood,” Pacific Historical Review 80 (Aug. 2011): 430‒67; and Robin Dale Jacobson, Daniel Tichenor, and T. Eliza- beth Durden, “The Southwest’s Uneven Welcome: Immigrant Inclusion and Exclusion in Arizona and New Mexico,” Journal of American Ethnic History 37 (Spring 2018): 5‒36. I do sometimes wonder, because I am an Arizonan, if these comparisons are fair. 40 McWilliams, North from Mexico, 83. 41 I had a difficult time finding consistent tourism numbers for Tombstone. Wikipe- dia listed 450,000 visitors in 2005, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tombstone,_Arizona (accessed September 18, 2019), while a 2016 report counted slightly more than 100,000 visitors. Charlie Clark, “Old West History Helps Corral Arizona Tourists—and not just in Tombstone,” June 4, 2017, http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/arts/report/060417_cow- boy_tourism/old-west-history-helps-corral-az-tourists-and-not-just-tombstone/ (accessed September 4, 2020). Covid reduced Tombstone tax revenues by at least 35 percent. Pat Parris, “Town Too Tough to Die Welcomes Back Tourists,” May 21, 2020, https://www. kgun9.com/open/town-too-tough-to-die-welcomes-back-tourists (accessed July 20, 2020). On some parents’ displeasure with gunfights, see Peter Prengaman and the Know, “One of the Old West’s Most Famous Towns is Rebranding,” Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.,), January 12, 2020, https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/12/tombstone-arizona-old- west-town-rebrand/ (accessed July 20, 2020). 42 Bisbee’17, directed by Robert Greene (Fourth Row Films, 2018). I served as historical adviser for this film. 43 Thomas E. Sheridan, Arizona: A History, rev. ed. (Tucson, 2012); Thomas E. Sheridan,

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1991 Yale dissertation “Strikitos,” on Mexican American miners in Arizona, and Susan L. Johnson’s article about Mexican women and Anglo men’s households in nineteenth-century Arizona, based on her ASU master’s thesis (before she went on to, yes, Yale for graduate study.)44 A few older unpublished theses and dissertations appear regularly in bibliographies as well, especially those of Dru McGinnis on statehood politics and Joseph Park’s magisterial master’s thesis on Mexican labor in Arizona.45 For northern Arizona, and especially Diné and environmental history, ASU historian Peter Iverson, whose teaching career began on the Navajo Reservation, has been indispensable.46 ASU women’s studies scholars Mary Logan Rothschild and Pamela Claire Hronek created an important anthology of Arizona women’s oral histories, as did Patricia Preciado Martin with Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican-American Women.47 In 1999, prominent women’s historian Linda Gordon published The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. The book chronicles the story of Irish orphans first adopted by Mexican mining families in Clifton-Morenci in 1904, and then violently removed from their new homes by white vigilantes.48 When I arrived at the University of Wisconsin, I had no idea that Gordon was just beginning her research for the project there. She later moved to New York University. It was my good fortune that Gordon was attracted to my graduate application’s focus on Arizona history.

Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854‒1941 (Tucson, 1986). 44 A. Yvette Huginnie, “‘Strikitos’: Race, Class, and Work in the Arizona Copper Industry, 1870‒1920” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1991); Susan L. Johnson, “Sharing Bed and Board: Cohabitation and Cultural Difference in Central Arizona Mining Towns,” Frontiers: A Jour- nal of Women Studies 7 (1984): 36‒42. Johnson later received a PhD from Yale University and won the Bancroft Prize for her book about gender and the Gold Rush; see Susan L. Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York, 2000). 45 Dru A. McGinnis, “The Influence of Organized Labor on the Making of the Arizona Constitution” (MA thesis, University of Arizona, 1930); Joseph Park, “The History of Mexican Labor in Arizona during the Territorial Period” (MA thesis, University of Arizona, 1961). 46 For a bibliography of Iverson’s work, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Iverson (accessed July 17, 2020). His own work focused on the Diné, but many of his doctoral students studied other Native groups. 47 Mary Logan Rothschild and Pamela Claire Hronek, Doing What the Day Brought: An Oral History of Arizona Women (Tucson, 1991); Patricia Preciado Martin, Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican-American Women (Tucson, 1992). 48 Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. The only previous book on the topic was written by a member of the family who ran the Phelps-Dodge company stores. See A. Blake Brophy, Foundlings on the Frontier: Racial and Religious Conflict in Arizona Territory, 1904‒1905 (Tucson, 1972).

[680] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way?

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction was controversial in some Arizona circles, but its publication did open up the state’s history to the national historical community. Written by a prominent historian with no personal or scholarly connection to the state, and published by Harvard University Press, the book won the cov- eted Bancroft Prize, given by Columbia University for the best book(s) on U.S. history.49 As one of Gordon’s doctoral students, I witnessed other historians finally take notice of Arizona and ask curious questions of her and me. Her book and letters of recom- mendations opened national fellowship committees and publish- ers to my work on Arizona—legitimated it among skeptics, I’m sorry to say—even as it required me to make plain what the dif- ferences between her work and mine were (one wonders had we both been writing about, say, California, Pennsylvania, or New York if that would have been necessary). Some Arizonans took issue with Gordon’s book, claiming it made too many generalizations about Mexican-origin people based on studies from elsewhere (she claimed that this tactic was because she could not find enough sources from Clifton-Morenci); some people did not like her neologism “Euro-Latin” for southern Europeans or felt she did not take the time to talk to locals (although she might dispute this point); and others might simply have resented that a book written by an “outsider” got so much attention.50 Still, many readers were delighted to see Arizona history—especially focused on working-class Mexican Americans—get attention from a prominent historian and a prestigious press. In 2006, Arizona history got a briefer but equally high-profile airing when Vicki Ruiz, who taught at Arizona State University, used an anecdote about nineteenth-century

49 Since the Bancroft Prize was first awarded in 1948, I counted sixteen years in which a book about the West won (I did not count “frontier” books about other geographical regions). Four books won from 1948 to 1955, not another until 1974, then 1980, 1992, and not again until 2000, with Gordon’s win. Since that time, however, eight more have won; 2009 was the only year with two winners about the West. See list of winners, available online at https://library.columbia.edu/about/awards/bancroft/previous_awards.html (accessed September 15, 2019). 50 See, for example, Phylis Cancilla Martinelli, “The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Book Review),” Journal of American Ethnic History 20 (Winter 2001): 132. On disgruntled readers my current evidence is admittedly anecdotal; in the early 2000s I had a conversa- tion with an Arizona Historical Society archivist, who reported some of the objections she had heard about the book, particularly in Tucson’s Mexican American community; one reader for this article added context. Gordon was my thesis advisor so I cannot claim to be objective on this question, although as an Arizona native I did see some things differently than she does.

[681] the journal of arizona history southern Arizona landowner Señora Doña Jesús de Soza to open her presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, and included many Arizona women in her history of Mexican American women, From Out of the Shadows.51 Let me be clear: by highlighting Arizona history published outside the state, I do not at all intend here to dismiss other histories of Arizona, many of which I discuss below or in the notes. I only want to emphasize that, unlike work about other southwestern states (see for example Sarah Deutsch’s No Separate Refuge, about New Mexico and published by Oxford University Press), these histories, whether in article or book form, were largely being produced and published in Arizona for Arizonans.52 State histories (many of which, not cited here, are designed for K-12 classroom use and are not written by historians) rarely cross-pollinate into other histori- ographies, and Arizona receives little attention outside western history circles, or biographies of Barry Goldwater.53 Other fields pay more attention to Arizona. Sheridan’s essential history of Arizona, for example, was first published in 1995 by the University of Arizona Press. Sheridan received his PhD in anthropology from and teaches at the University of Arizona. As an ethnohistorian, Sheridan belongs to a field and department—anthropology—that has focused more on Arizona than the field of history has.54 His is an astonishing

51 Vicki L. Ruiz, “Nuestra América: Latino History as United States History,” Journal of American History 93 (Dec. 2006): 655‒72; and Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1998). 52 In contrast, in the 1980s and 1990s, works about California, Texas, and New Mexico were published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Yale Univer- sity Press (Sarah Deutsch, Gunther Peck, and numerous titles at Yale). Pablo Mitchell’s book about New Mexico was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. 53 Major biographies of Barry Goldwater include Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwa- ter (New Haven, Conn., 1995); Peter Iverson, Barry Goldwater: Native Arizonan (Norman, Okla., 1997); and Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, 2009). See also Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, ed., Barry Goldwa- ter and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape (Tucson, 2013). 54 My perusal of Dissertations & Theses and America: History and Life has continued to show more interest in Arizona in anthropology and archaeology than in history, although I did not keep an exact count. Indeed, as Thomas Sheridan reminded me, the formative works on Arizona were also by historical anthropologists, including Edward Spicer, Henry F. Dobyns, and Bert Fireman. See Edward Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico and the United States on Indians of the Southwest, 1533‒1960 (Tucson, 1962). See also Dobyns’s review of Cycles of Conquest, in Arizona and the West 5 (Winter 1963): 361‒63. Dobyns’s important works include Tubac through Four Centuries: A Historical Resume and Analysis (1959) and Spanish Colonial Tucson: A Demographic History (1976). Fireman was a journal- ist by training but went on to become an important public historian in Arizona by run- ning the Arizona Historical Foundation for many decades. I had the distinct privilege of receiving a supportive letter from Dobyns about my first published article, shortly before

[682] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? revision of the old, tired narrative and is deeply rooted in historical and archival research. As Samuel Truett has noted, it did for Arizona what Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest did for western history more gen- erally. Mormon history, too, is central to the state’s history but has garnered relatively little attention outside Arizona (but see Daniel Herman’s article in this issue).55 Outside of the University of Arizona Press, most other titles about Arizona come from presses that emphasize western history, like the University of Oklahoma, the University of Nebraska, and the University of Nevada presses.56 In recent years, however, Arizona has received rising attention (even if the work is not characterized as Arizona history per se) among academics and national journalists. Since 2000, a growing number of scholars have published books either exclusively, or extensively, about Arizona in university presses located outside Arizona and the West. Among them are Daniel Herman, Samuel Truett, Karl Jacoby, Geraldo Cadava, Andrew Needham, Elizabeth Shermer, Katrina Jagodinsky (who got her PhD at the University of Arizona), and Andrew Ross (though his polemic about Phoenix takes more of a cultural studies approach).57 Jennifer Holland has just completed a western history of abortion politics in which Arizona figures heavily.58 At the

Dobyns’s death. Other important general histories of Arizona include Madeline Ferrin Paré and Bert Fireman’s Arizona Pageant: A Short History of the 48th State (Phoenix, 1965); Jay J. Wagoner’s Arizona Territory, 1863‒1912: A Political History (Tucson, 1970); Odie B. Faulk’s Arizona: A Short History (Norman, Okla., 1970); and Marshall Trimble’s various publications for general audiences. In 1889 Californian Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote History of Arizona and New Mexico as part of his cottage industry of western histories. I would also add that David Berman, the most prolific chronicler of Arizona political history, is a political scientist by training. His work is important but pays little attention to historiography. 55 See also Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing along the Little Colorado River, 1870‒1900 (Tucson, 1973). 56 A full bibliography is not possible here but, for example, recently, see Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Valley of the Guns: The Pleasant Valley War and the Trauma of Violence (Nor- man, Okla., 2018); Heidi J. Osselaer, Arizona’s Deadliest Gunfight: Draft Resistance and Tragedy at the Power Cabin, 1918 (Norman, Okla., 2018); and David R. Berman’s works, including Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890‒1920: Socialists, Populists, Miners and Wobblies (Boul- der, Colo., 2007). 57 Daniel Herman, Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West (New Haven, Conn., 2010); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.‒Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, Conn., 2008); Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York, 2012); Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Needham, Power Lines; Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia, 2013); Katrina Jagodinsky, Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854‒1946 (New Haven, Conn., 2016); Andrew Ross, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City (New York, 2011). 58 Jennifer L. Holland, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (Oakland,

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Because of current debates about the border and immigration, Arizona’s history has received renewed interest from scholars and journalists. Fallis Photo Collection, PC 042, Box 1, Folder 6, #42846, Arizona Historical Society, Tempe. same time, scholars of the larger U.S.‒Mexico border region who pay close attention to Arizona include Rachel St. John, Julian Lim, S. Deborah Kang, Grace Peña Delgado, and others. Journalists and press blurbs often obscure these Arizona connections, however, by referring to the “borderlands” as if it were a monolith, rather than a culturally and environmentally diverse political creation spanning nearly two thousand miles.59 Yet it is clear that recent border and immigration politics, and with them a vibrant new history of immigration, have increased attention to Arizona’s history, even if it is not couched as “Arizona history.” (I would aver that, like “Texas history,” the very state-cen- tric term might repel some who write critically about Arizona’s past or its interconnections with Mexico. The homelands and histories of Indigenous peoples do not, for example, adhere to state borders.) Arizona contains the largest chunk of the nation’s largest

Calif., 2020), also a Wisconsin PhD, who studied with Susan L. Johnson. 59 Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.‒Mexico Border (Princeton, N.J., 2012); Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.‒Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2017); S. Deborah Kang, The INS on the Line: Making Immi- gration Law on the US‒Mexico Border, 1917‒1954 (New York, 2017); Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.‒Mexico Borderlands (Stanford, Calif., 2012).

[684] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? and most populous Indian reservation—the Navajo Nation. This fact makes it unlike the rest of the United States, yet also important as a guide for questions surrounding sovereignty and reservation-state relations.60 In the early 1990s, fishing rights claims in the upper Great Lakes and the Pacific Northwest, the rising prominence of Indian gaming in places where Native peoples had not been highly visible, and the protests and environmental concerns around uranium and coal mining brought attention to Diné history as well. A growing historiography on energy extraction on the Navajo Reservation has raised larger issues around environmental justice campaigns and Indigenous rights.61 A new generation of scholars has paid increased attention to Mexican American (or Latinx) history in Arizona, though much more remains to be done.62 Laura Muñoz and Maritza de la Trinidad have shown that Arizona is part of the larger history of school deseg- regation in the American West and nationally. In 1925, Laird v. Romo became the first known legal challenge to the segregation of Mexican American schoolchildren, when Tempe rancher Adolpho Romo Jr. sued the school district. The case, which the Romo family won, was against Tempe School District No. 3 (where, a half century later, my own first-grade teacher, a Tempe High graduate, was the daughter of a Mexican American rancher from southern Arizona).63

60 The late historian Peter Iverson at Arizona State University, along with his colleague Donald Fixico, nurtured many scholars of Diné history, as well as the history of other Native peoples. I counted thirty-eight dissertations directly advised by Iverson at ASU, from 1996 to 2013. Proquest Dissertations & Theses counts 1,032 dissertations with keywords Navajo and Arizona with the subject “American History.” See, for examples, Farina King, “The Journey of Diné Students in the Four Directions: Navajo Educational Experiences in the 20th Century” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2016); Diana Meneses, “‘It is what holds us together as a people’: A history of the Ak-Chin Indian Community” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2009). What the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) portends for this question is still anyone’s guess. 61 See Environmental Protection Agency, “Navajo Nation: Cleaning up Abandoned Ura- nium Mines,” available online at https://www.epa.gov/navajo-nation-uranium-cleanup/ cleaning-abandoned-uranium-mines (accessed October 10, 2019). See also Needham, Power Lines; Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis, 2015); Judy Pasternak, Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed (New York, 2010); and Brian Fehrer and Sherry L. Smith, eds., Indians and Energy: Exploitation and Opportunity in the American Southwest (Santa Fe, 2010). 62 But see the formative mentoring by Francisco Arturo Rosales at Arizona State Uni- versity. See also the work of University of Arizona Regents Professor Oscar J. Martínez, Troublesome Border (Tucson, 1988; rev. ed., 2008). Also essential is Lydia R. Otero, La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City (Tucson, 2010). 63 Laura K. Muñoz, “Separate but Equal? A Case Study of ‘Romo v. Laird’ and Mexi- can American Education,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 2 (2001): 28‒35; and her manuscript, under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press. Maritza de la Trinidad’s

[685] the journal of arizona history

Another growing historiography, including work by pioneer- ing ASU archivist and historian Christine Marin, Darius Echevarría, and Eric Meeks, concerns the rise of Arizona’s Chicano/a rights movement, especially at Phoenix College, Pima Community College, and the state’s universities. More research on this remarkable cohort is badly needed. Many of the members of this first generation of activists, among them Marin herself, the late congressman Ed Pastor, and founders of Chicanos por la Causa, were the children of Arizona’s unionized copper miners. Yet most Latinx history in the United States continues to focus on Texas, California, and New York. More work on Arizona’s cohort of civil rights‒era activists will likely demonstrate connections between Arizona’s postwar cultural history and that of the American West and the nation.64

As Arizona Goes, So Goes the Nation? As Arizona has changed, so too has its relationship to the nation. For this article I set out to compare what seems to be true and what is true about Arizona in relation to the region and nation, and how these change over time. What I found both confirms and challenges some preconceived notions—including my own. For context, first consider Arizona’s transformations in the last century. Census data shows Arizona and the nation’s demographics converging. Where men outnumbered women by a third in the mining frontier of the early twentieth century, today, like the rest of the nation, women slightly outnumber men in Arizona.65 In 1910, almost one in four Arizonans published work includes, among other articles, “‘To Secure These Rights’: The Campaign to End School Segregation and Promote Civil Rights in Arizona in the 1950s,” Western Historical Quarterly 49 (March 2018): 155‒83. On Broadmor School’s beloved Mrs. Laura Mae Hurtado Logan’s family, see Borderline Americans, 174‒75. 64 Darius V. Echeverría, Aztlán Arizona: Mexican American Educational Empowerment, 1968–1978 (Tucson, 2014), esp. chaps. 4 and 5. Recent acquisitions of Ed Pastor’s personal papers by the Arizona State University Chicano Special Collections may open up new information about this group, as will the ongoing work of Christine Marin. For a recent history of postwar Arizona politics, see Cadava, Standing on Common Ground. Important additions include Maurice Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.‒Mexico Borderlands, 1598‒1912 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2019); Matthew C. Whitaker, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the American West (Lincoln, Neb., 2007). See also recent dissertations, including Lora Michelle Key, “‘We’re All Americans Now’: How Mexican American Identity, Culture, and Gender Forged Civil Rights in World War II and Beyond” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2020). 65 In 1910, the sex ratio in Arizona was 132 men to 100 women (down from 140.4 to 100 ten years earlier). For foreign-born men, mostly miners and farm laborers, the ratio was 188.4 to 1, and the residents born in the United States came from all over the country. Of the 46,824 foreign-born residents of Arizona, 29,452 were from Mexico (consider that

[686] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? was foreign-born. (The Bisbee Deportation of 1917 included strik- ers from at least thirty-four countries.) As of 2018, Arizona’s foreign- born population was 13.4 percent, close to the national average.66 Arizona’s growing population shifted with the advent of a new economy and water infrastructure. In 1910, more than two-thirds of the state’s population was rural. Cochise County, home of the mining boomtowns of Bisbee and Douglas, had the highest population density. There was once a large homesteading population in rural Arizona.67 However, like much of the West, Arizona’s population has become mostly urban. In 2019, 62 percent of Arizona’s estimated 7.2 million people live in Maricopa County, and another 1 million live in Pima County.68 Arizonans also resemble the rest of the nation in household composition, age distribution, and home ownership.69 However, according to 2015 statistics, more than a third (37 percent) of Arizona’s population is doing poorly or strug- gling financially (and these statistics predate the Covid-19 emer- gency), compared to 31.6 percent nationally.70 Arizona’s demographics have been replicated across the country. In 1920, four out of five Mexican immigrants in the United States proportion—surprisingly low, compared to today). 66 The 1910 census also counted 28,674 “Native Indian” peoples, a number almost equal, interestingly, to those from Mexico; those of us who think about Arizona history would be wise to consider the near-parity in Mexicans and U.S.–born Indigenous people in the early twentieth century. 67 U.S. Census Bureau, “Supplement for Arizona,” Population Census 1910 (Washington, D.C., 1912), available online at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decen- nial/1910/abstract/supplement-az.pdf (last accessed September 8, 2020). 68 For Maricopa County and Pima County populations statistics, see U.S. Census Bureau “Quickfacts,” available online at https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/pimacou ntyarizona,maricopacountyarizona,AZ/PST045219 (accessed September 8, 2020). On the West as an urban region, see Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981). 69 Two-thirds of Arizona households belong to families, and of these about 48 percent are married-couple families; the percentages of male- and female-headed households are also similar to the national statistics, unlike in 1910. Given the prominence of retire- ment communities and “snowbirds” in Arizona, state and national age distributions were surprisingly little different. The only meaningful divergence is in the ages forty-five to seventy-four, but never by more than one percentage point (though many “snowbirds” are counted as residents of their home states). Given the importance of the homebuilding and real estate industries in Arizona, it is also notable that the percentage of owner- vs. renter-occupied housing is almost the same as the rest of the country (63.1 percent vs. 63.8; 36.9 vs. 36.2 percent). 70 Among the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Study’s most-used statistics, only those about the ratio of income to poverty level show much of a difference between Arizona and national norms; 17 percent of Arizonans are “doing poorly” compared to 14.6 percent for the United States as a whole; two-thirds of Americans (67.3 percent) were “doing okay.”

[687] the journal of arizona history lived in just three states—California, Texas, and Arizona; one in five Arizonans was born in Mexico.71 But in recent years, the Latinx population has expanded across the country. Twenty-three states’ populations are at least 10 percent Latinx, compared to just ten in 2000. Georgia’s undocumented (largely Latinx) population grew from 220,000 to 490,000, though the numbers dropped shortly afterward. Georgia was also the first state to pass a law modeled on SB 1070.72 According to the Migration Policy Institute, Maricopa County is home to 1 percent of the entire nation’s undocumented population.73 Still, almost 80 percent of U.S. Latino/as are U.S. cit- izens and many more are legal residents.74 Arizona’s SB 1070 demands a discussion of politics. Other authors in this issue of the journal take up this topic in more detail, but here I want to underscore the dramatic change over time in Arizona and in its national influence. As Elizabeth Shermer’s study of neoliberalism in Phoenix shows, the reputation of Arizona as the bedrock of conservatism has its origins only in the years after World War II (the same moment Flannery Burke marks as Arizona becoming more like the rest of the nation, with New Mexico taking a different tack). Before the war, Arizona was both solidly Democratic and, in its territorial and early statehood years, downright radical (but its racial politics were deeply embedded in the racism of much of the white labor movement of the era).75 In the early twentieth century, Arizona shared a western trend of challenging old political forms, sometimes with radical experi- mentation. The longest-lasting outcomes were the state’s non-partisan municipal elections and the referendum, initiative, and recall. Of the nation’s thirty largest cities today, twenty-two hold non-partisan elections—Phoenix among them.76 Only one of these is in

71 Jaime Águila, “The Politics of Immigration and Identity: Why Twenty-First Century Arizona?” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 39 (Fall 2013): 138. 72 Águila, “The Politics of Immigration and Identity,” 142‒43. 73 Julia Gelatt and Jie Zong, “Settling In: A Profile of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population in the United States,” MPI Fact Sheet, November 2018, p. 3, available online at https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/profile-unauthorized-immigrant-population- united-states (last accessed September 8, 2020). 74 Elliot Davis, “13 States with Recent Hispanic Population Growth,” U.S. News and World Report, February 25, 2020, available online at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/ slideshows/13-states-with-recent-hispanic-population-growth (last accessed September 8, 2020). 75 Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, esp. ch.7. 76 “Partisan vs. Nonpartisan Elections,” National League of Cities website, available online at https://www.nlc.org/partisan-vs-nonpartisan-elections (accessed October 11, 2019).

[688] Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? the East (Boston), with the rest in Sunbelt cities and the Midwest. Similarly, the states with initiative and referenda lean heavily west- ward, with Massachusetts again the outlier. In this way, Arizona has long been more representative of the region—though not the nation—than distinct.77 Since the Progressive era, Arizona’s politics have always been more complicated than its national stereotypes. While pundits have tended to credit Barry Goldwater with losing the battle but winning the war of the new conservatism—giving Arizona a prominent if sym- bolic place in the history of American conservatism—it is clear that the state’s politics deserve more attention. The most famous politi- cians Arizona has produced are undoubtedly Barry Goldwater and John McCain—both Republicans, but with very different reputa- tions and political cultures attached to them. But Democrats Bruce Babbitt, Stewart Udall, and Janet Napolitano were all important political figures in the state, as is former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, whose tragic encounter with Arizona’s gun culture and weak safety net for the mentally ill has made her a poster child and activist for gun control. She might also have the first husband (Mark Kelly) of an elected political official to take up his wife’s political mantel, with his run for the Senate in 2020. The state has had four female governors, two Democrats and two Republicans—the most in the nation. At one time all five statewide elected officials were women. Both the current U.S. senators are women. Starting with the 1991 special election of Ed Pastor to replace Mo Udall, three Mexican Americans have held Arizona congressional seats. Arizona has had one Mexican American governor, Raúl Castro, the son of a Mexican mine union activist. In June 2012, the former governor was detained by the Border Patrol in Tubac for thirty minutes because radiation from his cancer treatment set off their sensors as he drove from Nogales to Tucson for a lunch celebrating his ninety-sixth birthday.78 Castro’s story requires me to be frank. The recent national and international interest in Arizona is about the border. In 2010, the Arizona State Legislature passed SB 1070, the so-called “show 77 “States with Initiative or Referendum,” Ballotpedia website, available online at https:// ballotpedia.org/States_with_initiative_or_referendum (accessed October 11, 2019). 78 Tim Steller, “Border Patrol detains former Arizona Gov. Castro after radiation alarm is tripped,” Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), June 23, 2012 (updated July 8, 2014), https://tucson. com/news/local/border/border-patrol-detains-former-arizona-gov-castro-after-radiation- alarm-is-tripped/article_f9517e5f-d600-53bb-9e13-d8de6d0d1e68.html (accessed Septem- ber 4, 2020).

[689] the journal of arizona history me your papers” law, signed by Governor Jan Brewer in April of that year. The law was an attempt by the state of Arizona to exact tighter control over undocumented immigrants than that being exercised by the federal government. SB 1070 consisted of several controversial components, all of which quickly faced legal challenges. Probably the most inflammatory was the law’s requirement that law-enforcement officers seek to find out the legal status of anyone they come across in a routine stop—“driving while brown.” (In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this component of the law, but by 2014 other rulings and consent agreements had essen- tially nullified the statute.)79 Whether this law made Arizona a self-made vanguard or the pawn in a larger battle is open to question.80 Introduced by then-State Senator Russell Pearce (R-Mesa), the bill was actually authored by national anti-immigrant activist Kris Kobach, of Kansas, who had no ties to Arizona. Pearce brought the idea to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an incubator for conservative legislation, and to Kobach.81 Kobach, who went on to become the Kansas secretary of state and later lost a race for governor there, joined Trump’s presidential transition team.82 As a 2019 Rolling Stone article notes, “By some accounts, Trump is following a playbook that was written in Arizona, a Republican-led state that spawned some of the most draconian anti-immigrant policies in the country. From the infamous ‘tent cities’—outdoor jails composed largely of migrants—to SB 1070 (a.k.a. the ‘show me your papers’ provision), a law that allows police to racially profile and determine the legal status of anyone they suspect to be undocumented.”83 Yet it seems the playbook was co-authored.

79 A useful summary can be found at Luigi del Puerto, “A timeline—the tumultuous legal life of Arizona’s SB1070,” Arizona Capitol Times (Phoenix), October 3, 2016. 80 Or, as one of my Arizona friends put it, “Arizona is the Petri Dish. When someone says oh Arizona follows Trump, I say no, Arizona made Trump possible,” direct message com- munication with author, August 2020. 81 “How Corporate Interests Got SB 1070 passed,” NPR’s Talk of the Nation, November 9, 2010, available online at https://www.npr.org/2010/11/09/131191523/how-corporate- interests-got-sb-1070-passed (accessed June 19, 2020). 82 Alia Beard Rau, “SB 1070 author Kris Kobach joins Donald Trump immigration transition team,” Arizona Republic, November 11, 2016, available online at https://www.azcentral. com/story/news/politics/politicalinsider/2016/11/11/sb1070-author-kris-kobach-joins- donald-trump-immigration-transition-team/93628108/ (accessed June 17, 2020). 83 Jason Motlagh, “The Deadliest Crossing,” Rolling Stone, September 30, 2019, available online at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/border-crisis-arizona- sonoran-desert-882613/ (accessed September 4, 2020). While heartbreaking, the article

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Within a year, sixteen states, starting with Georgia, had introduced or passed bills modeled on Arizona’s.84 Alongside the copycat SB 1070 bills, a flurry of media and academic attention also followed. The uproar over SB 1070 and related laws, like the ban on ethnic studies targeting the Tucson Unified School District’s high school Mexican-American Studies curriculum, showed the urgency of Arizona Latinx history and activism. It also produced a surge of new scholarship. The recent anthology Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona, edited by an anthropologist and a soci- ologist, was partly in response to the law. Likewise, a special issue of the Journal of American Ethnic History in 2018 was devoted to comparing Alabama’s copycat law to Arizona’s and others. A special issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies focused on several aspects of SB 1070. Many journalists have tackled the topic, no doubt most thoroughly in Jeff Biggers’s polemical State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown over the American Dream. One San Francisco event for the book was entitled, “The Arizonafication of America.”85 Consensus seems to be approaching the conclusion that the backlash against SB 1070 has mobilized an unprecedented Latinx political activism in Arizona, which is likely to earn a tenth congressional seat after the 2020 census. Kyrsten Sinema’s election to the Senate in 2018 installed the first Democrat in the post since Dennis DeConcini. For a state in which only four people were elected to Congress before World War II (and one congressional gives little attention to why border crossers use the Arizona desert and fails to put the numbers in long perspective. It also engages in the “othering” trope of tourist writing about the Southwest—calling the landscape “mars-like.” 84 Seth Freed Wessler, “Bills Modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070 Spread through States,” Colorlines, March 2, 2011, available online at https://www.colorlines.com/articles/bills- modeled-after-arizonas-sb-1070-spread-through-states (accessed September 4, 2020). 85 Luis B. Plascencia and Gloria H. Cuádraz, eds., Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona (Tucson, 2018); for comparisons of SB 1070 and other state laws pertaining to immigration see also “‘Juan Crow’ in Dixie: A Forum on Raymond A. Mohl’s ‘The Politics of Expulsion: A Short History of Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law, HB56,” Journal of American Ethnic History 35 (Spring 2016). Special issue is JAEH (April 1, 2018). See also Lisa Magaña and Erik Lee, eds., Latino Politics and Arizona’s Immigration Law SB 1070 (London, U.K., 2013); Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 29 (Fall 2013); Miranda Joseph and Sandra Soto, “Neoliberalism and the Battle over Ethnic Studies in Arizona,” Thought and Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal (Fall 2010): 45‒56; Jeff Biggers, State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown over the American Dream (New York, 2012); Otto Santa Ana and Celeste González de Bustamante, eds., Arizona Firestorm: Global Immigration Realities, National Media, and Provincial Politics (New York, 2012). For the event, see https://www.jeffrbiggers.com/ books/state-out-of-the-union/ (accessed October 11, 2019).

[691] the journal of arizona history seat), the future of its politics—and their relationship to the rest of the nation—remain to be seen.86

Conclusion I hope readers see my observations as the beginning of a conversa- tion, rather than the final word. History is always in revision, and in 2020, even more so. Yet it seems clear that Arizona has drawn and deserved—for good and ill―increased interest over the last three decades. Federal-state relations have manifested in new and, from a historical perspective, perhaps unpredictable ways as conservative Arizonans call for more federal control of the border, yet are split on whether to build a border wall or take private or pro- tected land to do so.87 And, with Phoenix the hottest major city in the United States, climate change—and climate change deniers— make Arizona a test case for environmental politics and policy. As Arizona’s population grows and its politics get more complex and volatile, border and immigration policy reach crisis, climate change becomes urgent, more historians attend to Indigenous and Latinx peoples, and Arizona and the nation begin to look more alike than different, the state may finally garner the notice it deserves from historians.88 Given early-twenty-first-century Arizona’s importance within the nation at large, Arizona history has never been more rel- evant—more national, and indeed, global—than it is now.89

86 See Geraldo L. Cadava, “Will this be the year Arizona turns blue?” New York Times August 27, 2020; Elaina Plott, “G.O.P. Women in Arizona Could Decide an Unexpected 2020 Battle,” New York Times, August 26, 2020. 87 Alexis Berdine, “N4T Investigators: Border Build,” June 23, 2020, KVOA.com, available online at https://kvoa.com/news/n4t-investigators/2020/06/23/n4t-investigators-border-build-2/ (accessed July 22, 2020); Erin Stone, “As monsoon storms loom, border wall construction begins across San Pedro,” Arizona Republic, July 17, 2020, available online at https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2020/07/17/even- monsoon-border-wall-construction-starts-san-pedro/5405614002/ (accessed July 22, 2020). 88 Two salutary new examples include Jacob Tropp, “‘Intertribal’ Development Strategies in the Global Cold War: Native American Models and Counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society & History 62 (April 2020): 421–52; and Anita Huizar- Hernández, Forging Arizona: A History of the Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West (New Brunswick, N.J., 2019). 89 See Ross, Bird on Fire; Colleen Strawhacker et al., “A Landscape Perspective on Climate- Driven Risks to Food Security: Exploring the Relationship between Climate and Social Transformation in the Prehispanic U.S. Southwest,” American Antiquity 85 (July 2020): 427–51; and Sarah Kaplan, “How America’s Hottest City Will Survive Climate Change,” Washington Post, July 8, 2020, available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph- ics/2020/climate-solutions/phoenix-climate-change-heat/ (accessed July 23, 2020).

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