Gregory Rodriguez: Arizona's Anglo Insecurity
[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the LA Times.]
...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.
What they found when they arrived (mostly to the hot emptiness of Phoenix), was not much in the way of Anglo culture. Earlier migrations didn't spring from the kind of foundational events, like California's Gold Rush or Texas' Alamo heroics, that made for distinctive Americana. And instead of truly engaging whatever was there, they adopted a veneer of real and imagined local color....
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."...
Read entire article at LA Times
...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.
What they found when they arrived (mostly to the hot emptiness of Phoenix), was not much in the way of Anglo culture. Earlier migrations didn't spring from the kind of foundational events, like California's Gold Rush or Texas' Alamo heroics, that made for distinctive Americana. And instead of truly engaging whatever was there, they adopted a veneer of real and imagined local color....
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."...