Avoiding Arizona
A lot of people already avoid Phoenix and Maricopa County, Arizona so they don’t have to concern themselves with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, but it looks like the rest of state has followed his lead and gone weird.
The state is less than 400 miles across whether you use I-40 or I-10, so it’s an easy day with one stop for fuel and food, and you don’t have to buy anything from Arizonans.
The Diné are up North, so you can buy from them, and if you want to visit the Grand Canyon, the Hualapai are on the south side, and that transparent observation deck over the Canyon is theirs.
If you need to use I-10 [or the I-10/I-8 combination to or from San Diego] then you can stop with the Tohono O’odham in the Sonoran Desert. If you have an interest in baskets, they make great ones, but the best ones are not cheap unless you really appreciate the craftsmanship.
If you are interested in how screwed up things are in Arizona, you should check out the Border Issues section in the Tohono O’odham entry.
Remember that Native American reservations are sovereign areas and not subject to the lunacy of the Arizona legislature.
13 comments
Yeah, the “border issues” thingy is fucked up for the Tohono O’odham. There’s roughly 2,000 or so of them stranded in a tiny wedge of Mexico because the racists in Congress are afraid that one or two of the enrolled Tohono O’odham on the tribal roster might not actually be “really” Tohono O’odham? God forbid that we accidentally give citizenship to one or two Indians who are actually “really” Mexicans! Horror!
– Badtux the “Gosh, racism, anybody?” Penguin
.-= last blog ..Lucky Clover =-.
Oh yeah, one last thing: Yeah, Arizona is really weird. But it’s a beautiful state, much like Florida is a beautiful sate. It’s just a shame that so many beautiful places are so full of racist Republicans… it’s as if they see beauty, and immediately want to Fuck It Up. Grrrr!
.-= last blog ..Lucky Clover =-.
It looked a lot better before agribusiness moved from the Imperial Valley to the I-8 corridor when Arizona started pulling water out of the Colorado.
I’ve never understood why people who were attracted to this area for its beauty immediately begin to sod over the white sand and throw up concrete boxes on minimal lots so no one can see the beach or the water.
Given the crap they had to go through to be “officially recognized” as a tribe, I would think that their records are just as accurate as rural Georgia or Florida.
I’m going to paraphrase an Austrian joke. The original was targeted at Steiermark…
Arizona is not a place any sane person wishes to spend time anyway, especially if that person is Mexican American or other Hispanic, or (as you point out) one of America’s indigenous peoples. It’s a good thing they have reservations… and look how resilient those have been over the past 200 years. [/snark]
.-= last blog ..Afterthought On ‘Ihre Papiere, Bitte’ =-.
How did you know that my brothers live in upstate New York and SoCal? 😉
Perhaps after the first few centuries you get used to a place and inertia keeps you there and you ignore the new people until it is too late.
We get occasional articles on Arpaio here. Let’s say I have no wish to visit Phoenix as a result!
.-= last blog ..Death of a good samaritan =-.
jams, I suspect even my accent and redness of skin would be enough to set Arpaio off… and no part of me is any of the typically “suspect” ethnicities. (I’m English, French and Dutch by origin, if it matters.) There really are places sane people don’t want to go. I’ve been across Arizona once, and considering everything that has happened, I think I will never stop in that state again. Bryan’s advice is welcome… I’m happy to pay my gas money to Native Americans if I have to go that way.
.-= last blog ..Afterthought On ‘Ihre Papiere, Bitte’ =-.
Bryan, I had no idea about your brothers. I think everyone… including me… has relatives in California. And upstate NY (Albany) is a place I stopped once for a night on a musical tour; it was memorable for three things: Buffalo wings (yes, we had them in Buffalo too, and yes, that was in my meat-eating days), a passel of kittens nipping and clawing at my feet in the person’s apartment I borrowed overnight (it saddens me to think that all those kittens have lived and died since I went there), and… most of all (this was midsummer)… street signs that said things like, “Snow Route / 3 Blocks North.” Those last were what persuaded me that, as fond of the early music scene as I was there, I would not seriously consider moving there. Too bad I’m such a weather wimp!
Of note, the Mexican government has just issued a travel warning for Arizona cautioning citizens about probable problems with visiting Arizona. This should make New Mexico and California happy. Not all Mexicans are poor and a lot of the not-poor Mexicans buy things, like houses and condos, in the US.
Jams, Arpaio was an “immigrant” from Massachusetts who started out with the Army’s Military Police and still acts like it. I would venture to say that most of those involved in this disaster weren’t born or raised in Arizona, because this isn’t how people brought up in a border state normally react to the conditions.
Well, Steve, you passed through the family homestead, originally both sides of the Mohawk River from West of Albany to East of Utica, but that was in the 17th century. It was purchased from the Iroquois by the Dutch as the Iroquois didn’t have the need to do the flood control that was required to make the flood plain usable, and the Dutch excelled in it.
Duff, sometimes you are a simpleton who can be easily led to frame arguments in ways useful only in demagogy… and this is such a case. First, you misrepresent what people are asserting. No one here suggested there are not problems with having undocumented alien residents here, only that perhaps pitching the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution onto the fire is a really, really stupid response to the problem. Most of us are also not as keen as you are on seeing families split up, work discouraged, crime reinforced by people suddenly with no livelihoods (on either side of the border) and sheriffs stopping Mexican Americans… that’s Mexican Americans… and demanding they show their papers as the price of proceeding.
Duff, if you ever really paid attention to Bryan when he talks about his cop stuff, you’d realize how constitutionally circumscribed the power of the police is here. You may disapprove of the changes we’ve made to the basic rules since we took our own space from your Mother England, but that’s just too damned bad… you don’t get to decide for us. Try actually reading what Bryan posts occasionally… against all odds, you might learn something about American government. But I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
First off, the great wave of border crossing is over, and began to ebb when the economy collapsed, so this isn’t the crisis that the Republicans in Arizona claim it is.
Second, I lived in Southern California and the obnoxious people were the white supremacists led by Tom Metzger and the anti-abortion groups, the majority of whom moved to San Diego from somewhere else. There were plenty of undocumented workers around and they kept to themselves. They also kept their crimes to themselves, i.e. their violence and thefts were pretty much confined to their own communities. In those cases that involved outsiders, the undocumented were almost always the victims, as is the pattern everywhere for poor people.
The reality that the Arizona Republicans refuse to honestly address is that effective control of the border would require enormous amounts of money and the only way of getting it is to raise taxes. Without even looking, I can assure you that the Arizona legislature did not include any money to pay for the enforcement of this unConstitutional mandate.
Arizona was taken at gun point from Mexico in 1848 in the totally bogus Mexican War. It has been a state for less than a century. The government of the state is in the pocket of developers, agribusiness, and mining interests. The undocumented workers are breathe of fresh air compared to the ruling elite in the state.
You forgot about the strong Mormon presence in Arizona too, which adds its own special stench of funny long underwear racism to the proceedings. (For the interested, google the terms “mormon racism” and “mormon underwear” and be enlightened). A significant percentage of the Republican leadership in Arizona is Mormon and shares those traditional Mormon values of believing that dark-skinned peoples “bear the mark of Cain” and thus are lesser peoples…
– Badtux the Helpful Penguin
Of course, historically the southern part of the state was settled by slave owners from Texas and the northern section by Mormon settlers sent down from Utah by Brigham Young.
The golf course developers have taken over Phoenix, adding humidity to the heat of summer with their irrigation.
The people who were born and raised there have been pushed aside by outsiders.