Silvia Solis and David Ulloa Jr Arizona Republic
Published 7:02 a.m. MT Oct. 13, 2024 Updated 7:03 a.m. MT Oct. 13, 2024
Dozens of community members packed the communal space of the Copper Courier office in central Phoenix for the Sept. 10 debate watch party hosted by LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona) and the local news organization.
The room was filled with people of all ages and backgrounds enticed by the excitement of the presidential debate where for the first and seemingly only time Kamala Harris and Donald Trump would be face to face.
The audience members resembled moviegoers at the opening premiere of a highly anticipated box office hit as they munched on snacks and watched the candidates answer key questions about issues impacting them and their loved ones.
As Trump delivered a false statement regarding immigrants living in Ohio, the audience burst out into laughter. Outlandish statements, Greisa Martinez Rosas, the Executive Director of United We Dream, assured the crowd, but this was no laughing matter.
“This is not a game,” she said to them.
The comment was symbolic of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that, like in 2015, has again gained traction during this election cycle, and one that is impacting border states directly.
That’s the case in Arizona, one of seven battleground states.
On the Nov. 5 ballot, alongside contentious abortion and minimum wage measures, Arizona voters will find Proposition 314, a measure combining several failed Senate and House bills and one successful House resolution, that aims to place immigration law into state hands.
The proposal would make crossing the border illegally a state crime, allow local judges to issue deportation orders and stiffen penalties against fentanyl smuggling.
According to Arizona State Sen. Janae Shamp, a key architect of a vetoed bill that the measure is based on, Prop. 314 "directly deals with the act of illegally crossing into Arizona from Mexico anywhere other than a lawful port of entry, and law enforcement would need probable cause that a person committed the act in order to make an arrest," she told The Republic in an email.
Crossings have dropped considerably, impacted by an executive order the Biden administration implemented in June limiting asylum cases and stricter immigration enforcement taking place in Mexico.
Organizers like Martinez Rosas and Alexandra Gomez, executive director at Living United for Change in Arizona, also known as LUCHA, believe the proposition’s approval would bring back a time similar to when SB 1070, also known as the “show me your papers” law, was approved. That law was partially struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012, but the legislation’s effects long surpassed that ruling.
Eyes filled with tears during an interview with La Voz/The Republic, Gomez recalled the signing of SB 1070 into law by then-Gov. Jan Brewer. She was with fellow organizers at the time, but she was also among everyday community members.
That day, on April 23, 2010, she watched on as a youth pastor and “all of the young people” fell to their knees in prayer outside of the Capitol.
It was a time during which being undocumented in Arizona was dangerous, as then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was notorious for targetting this community and detaining them for extended periods in his infamous Tent City.
SB 1070 would enhance those efforts statewide and would continue separating families.
Gomez was witness to that becoming a reality. “If somebody was wearing a silk t-shirt with the Virgin Mary, stop them and ask them for papers. If a car had too much fringe or like too many things hanging from it, stop them and ask them for papers. If you see somebody wearing botas, stop them and ask them for papers,” Gomez said of law enforcement officers.
This period of deep despair and pain among the immigrant community fueled a generation of activists, she said.
Every election cycle, their mission continues: civically and politically activate community members. This time around, however, they believe the stakes are higher as they knock on doors to avoid the resurgence of “SB 1070 2.0" that would impact immigrants and their families across the state, the majority of which are Latino — 61% of the state's 962,000 immigrant population, according to 2022 figured from the Migration Policy Institute.
Like the changing demographics of Arizona, the organizing landscape has also evolved, with the same kids and teenagers who grew up together during immigration raids and SB 1070 making a name for themselves as community leaders and who continue to link arms in the face of anti-immigrant legislation.
The way they fight back today is strategic, involving activating all members of the community, especially Latinos who make up over 33% of Arizona’s population.
They have decades of crucial student movements — from nationwide hunger strikes and walkouts led by the Chicano Movement to the localized group of student activists who called on the State Legislature to allow undocumented students to pursue higher education at in-state rates — to thank for that.
The Chicano Movement generation lays the groundwork for
fights to come
The participation of Mexicans in agricultural work, especially those in California and Arizona, was one of the most significant triggers in the development of the Chicano Movement, precipitating the mobilization of Latinos for generations to come in Arizona.
With significant civil rights leaders, like labor rights activist César Chávez and Martin Luther King Jr., successful movements nationwide inspired young people in Arizona to organize and build one successful movement after another.
“My sophomore year, in 1968, a group of students in my high school campus came to recruit young Mexican American (students),” said Danny Ortega, lawyer, activist, and Chicanos Por La Causa Sí Se Vota Action Fund board member, referring to the Mexican American Student Organization known as MASO, and its successor, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de
Aztlán (M.E.Ch.A.), at Arizona State University.
“It was people from ASU looking to recruit people to go to college, to go to the university. When I met them, that was the beginning of the end for me.”
At the time, Latino students were encouraged to join vocational education programs almost exclusively, according to Ortega, which reduced the opportunities to raise questions about the inequities present in higher education.
In this context, the student-led Chicano Movement emerged in Arizona.
“It was a great time of social discussion and social interaction of the plight of our community, and in the 60s,” said Ronnie Lopez, late former Chicanos Por La Causa CEO, in a documentary celebrating the organization's 50th anniversary produced by Arizona PBS.
“Quite frankly, it's what gave birth to the organization.”
Chicanos Por La Causa, founded in Phoenix in 1969, aims to address social issues and discrimination against the Mexican-American community. Today, it is the largest Hispanic nonprofit organization in the country, with offices in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas.
Years later, Arizona became the home of the notorious Tent City.
Civil rights activist and head of the Chicanos Por La Causa Advocacy Team, Lydia Guzman said her father used to say, “'Lydia, you can’t just protest! You have to be at the table or you’re going to be on the menu. You have to be inside of the walls and you have to be at the table.'”
She did a little of both, she said.
Guzman recalled when a group of undocumented people were apprehended during the 1997 Chandler Roundup — a time when hundreds of undocumented immigrants were detained by Chandler police. Guzman said she got to work with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) and with the knowledge she gained organizing as a college student in
California, started building coalitions.
Guzman would go on to become the president of the Somos America coalition where she would meet future politicians and community leaders, such as former City Councilperson Carlos Garcia and Reyna Montoya, the founder and CEO of Aliento.
The coalitions were a group of community organizations where Guzman said they came together in a metaphorical roundtable where no one was above one another and there was a free flow exchange of ideas.
During the raids in the early 2000s, Guzman said she would mobilize different tiers of what she called “rapid response teams” which included a team of lawyers, a team of people with cameras and a team of activists.
The synergy of all these factors gave rise to fights at the turn of the century that expanded exponentially with a base of student activists and organizers rooted in the heart of Phoenix.
Undocumented and uneducated, students raise their voice
Having attended schools in the Murphy Elementary School District, Issac School District and Phoenix Union High School District, Viri Hernandez, the executive director of Poder in Action has called west Phoenix her home since she was 1, but she knew she was born elsewhere.
“I grew up knowing that I wasn’t from here, but I didn’t know what that meant and at that time no one really talked about being undocumented,” Hernandez said.
So when Hernandez was in school, instead of saying she was born in Jojutla, Morelos, Mexico, she said she remembered lying during class introductions and said she was from Phoenix. She remembered being asked by her parents to never share where she was from, even though she didn’t understand why.
At 16, Hernandez learned of the barriers people like her and her family faced due to their unauthorized status. On top of that, she learned of what Proposition 300 would do to undocumented students looking to pursue higher education.
“It was hard. I found out I didn’t have papers. I couldn’t go to school. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t have a job. So all this you’re finding out when everyone is making plans for their life and their future and you’re finding that you can’t really do any of those things,” Hernandez said.
Prop. 300 was approved by Arizona voters in 2006, barring undocumented immigrants from receiving state benefits, such as in-state tuition and financial assistance and subsidized child care. Parts of the measure were repealed 16 years later in 2022 when voters approved Proposition 308, granting some undocumented students the ability to quality for in-state tuition.
Cristian Avila with Poder Latinx arrived in Arizona with his family from his native Mexico when he was 9. Like Hernández, he grew up knowing that he was undocumented, always told to be careful with authorities.
When Prop. 300 went to the ballot, Avila said his parents’ dream of paying for his and his two brothers’ academic careers became impossible, forcing them to finance nearly triple the cost of state tuition.
At the time, Avila said he didn’t know there were so many undocumented people in the state. People didn't talk about that, he said, leading him to think there were only 100 or 200 undocumented people in Arizona. As he got involved in organizing, he learned just how much this legislation would hurt families like his.
Avila became involved with Mi Familia Vota, an organization dedicated to building Latino political power. They weren't successful in preventing Prop. 300's passing, but the work lit a spark among his peers, and he wanted that to always be a part of him.
Former La Voz Arizona reporter, Luis Avila, witnessed how these students became activated, pushing for access to in-state tuition and going a step further to join the fight in support of the DREAM Act, a failed federal legislation that has been introduced repeatedly since 2001 seeking to grant temporary stay and a path to residency to undocumented immigrants.
The Arizona Dream Act Coalition was born in 2006 in response to both legislations. Avila, board member and founder of Instituto, a community organization dedicated to building political power in low-income and communities of color, said the Arizona State University pro-immigration movement started around 2005.
Avila said it was the strategic leadership of older activists on campus who brought the students together into a real movement.
With rising anti-immigrant tensions since the 90s, Avila said it was in 2010 when he saw the rise of the “trifecta” of what would be the three anti-immigrant state powers of Russel Pearce in the State Senate, Brewer and Arpaio.
But there was a paralleled response from students that had been growing since 2001 that led to the rise of future community leaders like Hernandez and Gomez.
Gomez, the daughter of immigrants and the product of a mixed-status home, said her family moved from California to Arizona after California passed Proposition 187 in 1994, which barred undocumented immigrants from accessing public benefits. At the time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids were also common in workplaces across the state.
Gomez said her father, who was undocumented, sat them down and told her family that he would either be detained or deported if they stayed in California.
At 10, Gomez and her family made another move and started over in the Grand Canyon state.
Gomez became active soon after it passed due to the threat SB 1070 posed for her family.
One day in 2008, when Gomez was at a First Friday event in downtown Phoenix, she heard someone yell, “‘Who wants to get rid of Sheriff Joe?!’ And in that moment, I b-lined it all the way over to them and it was (former Arizona State Sen.) Raquel Terán.”
Her involvement ranged from protests to fasts and staging sit-ins at Arpaio’s and Brewer's offices.
Before SB 1070 was passed, Gomez, Terán and other organizers held a three-day vigil outside of Brewer’s home and at the State Capitol.
“That vigil that started for three days, the momentum kept growing. We saw seven people; we saw 50 people; and by the end... almost, probably 50,000 people had descended upon the Arizona State Capitol,” Gomez said.
As the oldest of three children and the child who often helped her parents with translations and paperwork, Abril Gallardo, the Chief of Staff of Living United for Change in Arizona, felt the need to protect her family, who are from Hidalgo, Mexico, a Mexican state nearly 1,500 miles away from Phoenix, against the looming threat of deportation from SB 1070.
In response, Gallardo said she joined LUCHA right out of high school through a know-your-rights meeting and got involved in the "Adios Arpaio" voter initiative to unseat him.
Gallardo said she remembered the 2012 “Undocumented and Unafraid” protests that occurred outside of Trevor G. Browne High School where several undocumented students blocked traffic at a nearby intersection. In 2016, Arpario was voted out of office, achieving the goal of that campaign.
One day when Gallardo was sitting in the Senate gallery, she said she felt herself reliving the same fear she felt in 2010 when she heard legislators using rhetoric such as “criminals” to describe undocumented people coming into the United States. That was during a Senate committee hearing this year of an immigration bill that was eventually vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs — the same language now being proposed in Prop. 314.
The legislation has become a priority for her and her colleagues at LUCHA, Poder Latinx, CPLC and other Latino-led organizations. But their efforts do not stop there.
Building movements that last beyond Nov. 5
Arizona’s political makeup has changed dramatically over the past few decades. In 2010, all heads of state government were Republicans. That year’s election gave Republicans a clear majority with 21 senators and 36 representatives, compared to 9 and 24 Democrats, respectively.
Many of the high school students who were at the capitol in 2010 went on to become public servants, foundation leaders and community organizers. “It was a catalyst to a generation of leaders that were impatient for justice and not going to wait for it and were going to fight to have it,” Gomez said.
Beyond immigration, this same group of leaders look to issues that are of key interest to the Latino electorate. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 85% of Latino voters selected the economy as a top issue in this year’s presidential election, followed by health care (71%), violent crime (62%), and gun policy (62%), with immigration lagging in fourth place with 59% of Latino voter interest.
According to Lisa Magana, Associate Dean of Strategic Charter Initiatives and School of Transborder Studies professor at Arizona State University, “We are seeing more and more new American electorate, new folks targeted, women, young folks, newly naturalized folks, and groups you don’t usually think about,” she said.
Immigration is an issue that is often used in politics, especially during election cycles, according to Magana, and as the electorate evolves, it would be a mistake to assume Latinos would vote in stereotypical ways or to view them as a monolith.
“The Latino population is very heterogeneous, not a homogeneous community. Like the rest of the population, they have diverse political views,” said Irasema Coronado, director and professor of the School of Transborder Studies at ASU.
In 2024, ahead of the November election, Republicans retain a majority in the state legislature, but the difference is marginal with only two Republican members outnumbering Democratic officials in each of the two legislative chambers.
“I believe that the state is changing,” Coronado added, saying that it is in large part due to these community leaders. “The young people who saw their parents being deported, children who were born here, they see the injustices and see how SB 1070 impacted their families.
They grew up, they registered to vote, and guess what? They got involved.”
Guzman remembers community leaders such as Montoya from Aliento and democratic representatives like Anna Hernandez, Lorena Austin, and Cesar Aguilar, as young student activists and she said she remembers watching them grow into the leaders they are today.
“We all get old,” Guzman said, her goal shifting to working on a pipeline of activists by serving as a mentor, supporter and a guide to the new generation of leaders and activists.
While the same type of organizing is not being seen this time around, should Prop. 314 come to pass, she believes that work will once again take place.
Students do not become activists because they want to. It's something a young person is forced into to protect their loved ones, she said.
“There’s going to be unsettling that takes place in their homes. As their parents are talking about emergency plans, ‘mijo, if something happens to me, don’t forget that mi comadre down the street is going to be taking care of you guys,’” Guzman said, as families will likely prepare for the worst scenario: being deported. It's what she saw during SB 1070.
As children and teenagers see this emergency preparation, the need to fight back will ignite, Guzman said.
“Those are the ones that usually end up talking with their friends and before you know it, in that conversation is where you find things like student walkouts; where you find things like protests and marches,” she said, and that action will lead them to the organizers who came before them who will undoubtedly guide them into community leadership.
At a joint press conference in early September with Activate 48 coalition partners Chispa AZ, Mi Familia Vota and Our Voice, Our Arizona, Gallardo announced that LUCHA would be joining the Together We Will campaign, an effort to knock on 1 million doors by Nov. 5 and educate voters on candidates and ballot initiatives.
The debate watch party LUCHA hosted on Sept. 10 was another chance to educate potential voters about Prop. 314. Gomez urged folks present to look to local candidates and initiatives with as much enthusiasm as they did presidential the ticket, while Martinez Rosas reminded them to embrace the power of community organizing when seeking change in their
neighborhoods.
“The feeling of collective care, of connecting and supporting each other... those are the three things that I think are going to bring us closer to the country and the world that we want to live in,” Martinez Rosas said. “You can have the most brilliant political strategy, you can have the most brilliant political people, but without the culture, the spirit and the stories, it’s useless.”
Comments