[UPDATE BELOW]
Less than a month after Russell Pearce crowed at a Gilbert, Ariz., Tea Party meeting that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s “immigration policy is identical to mine” — a brash claim that Republican operatives scrambled to explain — the self-proclaimed Tea Party president and architect of Arizona’s punitive immigration law might now be scrambling himself. Pearce has previously praised J.T. Ready, the alleged gunman in Wednesday’s tragic killing of five people in the same Phoenix suburb.
In 2006, Pearce told an interviewer on a video that emerged last year that he also considered Ready to be a “true patriot, to the real purpose, the limited purpose, to the Republican platform that we have.”
According to news reports, Wednesday’s victims included Ready’s apparent girlfriend, two others adults and a child, along with Ready’s apparent suicide, and was most likely connected to a domestic dispute.
While Ready, a neo-Nazi activist, might have made more headlines for his “U.S. Border Guard” and defiantly white supremacist tirades against immigrants from Mexico, his shadowy connections to Pearce and others in Arizona’s extremist political circles remain troubling. Earlier this spring, Ready had announced his intention to run for sheriff of Pinal County, on the outskirts of Phoenix.
Ready possessed an undeniable showmanship and proclivity for attracting media attention to Arizona’s immigration crisis. He had been court-martialed twice from the military, yet still managed to invoke the veteran tag until he was stripped of his role as master of ceremonies for a Veteran’s Day parade in Mesa. That didn’t stop Ready from making a failed bid for the Mesa City Council, or gaining a spot as a precinct committeeman for the Republican Party in 2008.
Thanks to Phoenix New Times’ Stephen Lemons’ indefatigable muckraking over several years, we know how Ready involved himself with the National Socialist Movement and nativist border groups while maintaining a relationship with Pearce. In fact, Pearce had taken part in Ready’s baptism in the Mormon Church and ordained him as an elder in the Melchizedek priesthood.
Despite the mounting evidence, Pearce denied association with Ready and emailed Lemons in response to the “true patriot” video in the winter of 2011: “No one could have known or guessed he would later become involved with radical hate groups.”
However, the Anti-Defamation League in Phoenix had already warned Pearce about Ready’s Nazi activities in 2006. A year later, local media began to report on Ready’s white supremacist affiliations after a legislative hearing. At an anti-immigrant rally in Phoenix in the summer of 2007, Pearce had watched admiringly as Ready wooed the crowd.
In the end, it was Ready who felt betrayed by Pearce’s political maneuvers. “He’s supposed to be a lawman,” Ready charged in a taped interview with Phoenix videographer Dennis Gilman, after Pearce closed the door on their relationship due to all of the media attention, “but he has a pattern of criminality.”
“He is the worst kind of racist,” Ready referred to Pearce in a New Times interview in the fall of 2010. “One who will do anything to achieve power, then trample on our rights like a tyrant when he gets that power.
Ready added, “I christen him Grand Wizard of the AZ Senate!”
Ready’s connections are not just limited to Pearce. State legislator Sylvia Allen introduced a bill this spring for Arizona to fund and arm its own border militia, which was arguably modeled on Ready’s controversial militia antics that won national media-coverage.
As national debate raged over SB 1070 in the summer of 2010, Ready announced his militia initiative on his “white supremacist New Saxon site, inviting participants to “bring plenty of firearms and ammo.” Ready admonished: “Camouflage or earth tone clothing [is] preferred…Bandanas, balaclavas, or other identity concealing items are permissible and encouraged.” He declared: “This is the Minuteman Project on steroids! THE INVASION STOPS HERE!”
Two weeks ago, armed apparent militia activists in camouflage ambushed and killed two undocumented migrants in an incident that remains unsolved.
Regardless of any connection he may have had to that attack, Ready has brought another bitter chapter of death to the border state’s headlines.
Update: Russell Pearce has released a statement regarding his relationship with Ready. “I knew JT Ready, I did, as did many of us who have been involved in Mesa politics for a long time. When we first met JT he was fresh out of the Marine Corp and seemed like a decent person,” it reads, in part. “ At some point in time darkness took his life over, his heart changed, and he began to associate with the more despicable groups in society. They were intolerant and hateful and like so many who knew him from before, I was upset and disappointed at the choices he was making. I worked with others to have him removed from his local position within our Republican Party because there has never been and will never be any room in our Party or our lives for those preaching hatred.”
In a clarification of last Friday’s announcement of a list of Mexican-American studies books to “be cleared from all classrooms” in order to comply with a state ban on ethnic studies, the Tucson Unified School District declared Tuesday that it ”has not banned any books as has been widely and incorrectly reported.”
Salon reported last week that TUSD had “banned” seven textbooks and forbidden the teaching of Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” in Mexican-American literature classes, a story that was picked up by two Arizona newspapers as well as Democracy Now radio program.
“Seven books that were used as supporting materials for curriculum in Mexican American Studies classes have been moved to the district storage facility,” the statement read, “because the classes have been suspended as per the ruling by Arizona Superintendent for Public Instruction John Huppenthal.” District spokesperson Cara Rene added that “the books may be considered for future use as new curriculums are created going forward. We are seeking assistance from the Arizona Department of Education to help us create new classes for the 2012/13 school year.”
Huppenthal, who campaigned in 2010 to stop the Mexican-American studies program, overruled an independent audit that praised the curriculum and ruled last month that it violated the state ban.
The TUSD statement “lacks accuracy and represents a thinly veiled attempt to cover up with distortions what is happening,” said Richard Martinez, the lead attorney on behalf of teachers and students challenging the ban in federal court. “Pandora’s box has been opened and the ugly face of the bigoted right wing has been exposed for what it is: an attempt to keep Latinos, poor, dumb and abused.”
Whether the removal of the books from all classrooms should be considered an outright ban or a possibly temporary prohibition brought little comfort to supporters of Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program, who sponsored an emotional community forum last Saturday with students and teachers who had witnessed the forced removal of the books from their classrooms.
“In regards to this double-speak about these books being banned,” said Cholla High School teacher Lorenzo Lopez, “it is irrelevant if these books are banned from the entire district or just from our classes. If our kids can’t have access to that knowledge, and it was urgent that these books be removed immediately from our classes, they are, in effect, banned.”
According to one teacher, the mandated roundup of texts included their own personal libraries in the classroom.
“We were told by our principal that we need to comply with the law and that meant that with the suspension of Mexican-American studies classes we had to remove the listed books from our classrooms immediately,” said Pueblo High School teacher Sally Rusk. “Our own personal copies were not to be on our book shelves either. It seems obvious to us that being made to take certain books out of the classroom — even when used as reference books and not class sets — is censorship. How can not allowing teachers to use these books, even as reference material in a traditional U.S. history course, not be interpreted as banning those books?”
Retired educator David Safier also questioned whether the book removals conflicted with last week’s school board agreement. In a blog post, Safie wrote, “The decision makes a mockery of this passage from the recent school board resolution to suspend MAS courses: ‘The district shall revise its social studies core curriculum to increase its coverage of Mexican-American history and culture, including a balanced presentation of diverse viewpoints on controversial issues. The end result shall be a single common social studies core sequence through which all high school students are exposed to diverse viewpoints.’”
TUSD spokesperson Rene noted that while former Mexican-American studies teachers may not be able to include the removed books in their courses, “Every one of the books listed above is still available to students through several school libraries. Many of the schools where Mexican-American studies classes were taught have the books available in their libraries. Also, all students throughout the district may reserve the books through the library system.”
In a district of more than 60,000 students, 61 percent of whom come from Mexican-American families, library copies of the targeted seven books appear to be sparse. There are two district-wide copies available of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, which had been singled out by state superintendent Huppenthal. The district’s online catalog showed only one copy of the Critical Race Theory textbook. Tucson High School does not have one of the 16 copies available in the district of the textbook “Rethinking Columbus: The Next Five Years,” according to the catalog.
The TUSD administration also denied “The Tempest” had been banned. According to the statement, “Teachers may continue to use materials in their classrooms as appropriate for the course curriculum. ‘The Tempest” and other books approved for curriculum are still viable options for instructors.”
However, in a recorded meeting with his administrators last Wednesday, Tucson High School teacher Curtis Acosta was admonished not to teach the classic play in his literature class using the “nexus of race, class and oppression” or “issues of critical race theory.”
“What is very clear is that ’The Tempest’ is problematic for our administrators due to the content of the play and the pedagogical choices I have made,” Acosta said in an interview. “In other words, Shakespeare wrote a play that is clearly about colonization of the new world and there are strong themes of race, colonization, oppression, class and power that permeate the play, along with themes of love and redemption.
“At the end of the meeting it became clear to all of us that I need to avoid such literature and it was directly stated. Due to the madness of this situation and our fragile positions as instructors who will be frequently observed for compliance, and be asked to produce examples of student work as proof of our compliance, I cannot disagree with their advice. Now we are in the position of having to rule out ’The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’ ‘The Great Gatsby,’ etc. for the exact same reasons.”
Lorenzo Lopez said that when his daughter, Korina, a plaintiff in the federal court case, heard the texts had been taken to a storage facility, she asked him, “Isn’t that the book graveyard where they send all the old books, never to be seen again?” Lopez said he replied, “Yes, it is.”
As part of the state-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its schools today. According to district spokeperson Cara Rene, the books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.”
Facing a multimillion-dollar penalty in state funds, the governing board of Tucson’s largest school district officially ended the 13-year-old program on Tuesday in an attempt to come into compliance with the controversial state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies.
The list of removed books includes the 20-year-old textbook “Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years,” which features an essay by Tucson author Leslie Silko. Recipient of a Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Silko has been an outspoken supporter of the ethnic studies program.
“By ordering teachers to remove ‘Rethinking Columbus,’ the Tucson school district has shown tremendous disrespect for teachers and students,” said the book’s editor Bill Bigelow. “This is a book that has sold over 300,000 copies and is used in school districts from Anchorage to Atlanta, and from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. It offers teaching strategies and readings that teachers can use to help students think about the perspectives that are too often silenced in the traditional curriculum.”
Another notable text removed from Tucson’s classrooms is Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” In a meeting this week, administrators informed Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes,” including the teaching of Shakespeare’s classic in Mexican-American literature courses.
Other banned books include “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by famed Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos” by Rodolfo Acuña, two books often singled out by Arizona state superintendent of public instruction John Huppenthal, who campaigned in 2010 on the promise to “stop la raza.” Huppenthal, who once lectured state educators that he based his own school principles for children on corporate management schemes of the Fortune 500, compared Mexican-American studies to Hitler Jugend indoctrination last fall.
An independent audit of Tucson’s ethnic studies program commissioned by Huppenthal last summer actually praised “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” a 40-year-old textbook now in its seventh edition. According to the audit: “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos is an unbiased, factual textbook designed to accommodate the growing number of Mexican-American or Chicano History Courses. The auditing team refuted a number of allegations about the book, saying, ‘quotes have been taken out of context.’”
Freire’s work on pedagogy has been translated into numerous languages, and is taught at universities around the United States.
In a school district founded by a Mexican-American in which more than 60 percent of the students come from Mexican-American backgrounds, the administration also removed every textbook dealing with Mexican-American history, including “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement” by Arturo Rosales, which features a biography of longtime Tucson educator Salomon Baldenegro. Other books removed from the school include “500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures,” by Elizabeth Martinez and the textbook “Critical Race Theory” by scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.
“The only other time a book of mine was banned was in 1986, when the apartheid government in South Africa banned ‘Strangers in Their Own Country,’ a curriculum I’d written that included a speech by then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela,” said Bigelow, who serves as curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, and co-directs the online Zinn Education Project. ”We know what the South African regime was afraid of. What is the Tucson school district afraid of?”
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Update: In response to this story the Tucson Unified School District issued a statement saying that the books removed from the classrooms are still available in the District’s library system and will be considered for possible use in the 2012-2013 school year. Salon included this information in its follow-up story.
When folklorist James “Big Jim” Griffith launched Tucson Meet Yourself, a folk traditions festival in 1974, he sought to gather the loose ends of the burgeoning southwestern city in a celebration of its diversity and mutual interests. The downtown festival flourishes a generation later; but large parts of the greater city of Tucson, defined by many for its fraying edges of suburban desert sprawl and strip malls, have also unraveled into transient, segregated and anonymous enclaves where few people will know or ever meet each other.
In 2009, a study commissioned by the Center for the Future of Arizona found that only 12 percent of surveyed residents in the state agreed that “people in our communities care about each other.”That all changed, at least for a while, on January 8th, 2011, when 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner stepped out of a taxi in front of a Safeway supermarket on the northwest suburban edge of the city and unloaded an estimated 32-rounds of bullets from an extended magazine clip once banned under the Violent Crime and Control Law Enforcement Act. The story of his derangement is well known now. His target was 41-year-old US Rep. Gabby Giffords, who he managed to shoot in the head; Loughner killed six people and injured 18 other citizens before he was wrestled to the ground and disarmed.
Along with the lost lives of an unusually diverse group of citizens, including federal Judge John Roll, congressional aide Gabe Zimmerman, nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, and retirees Dorothy “Dot” Morris, Phyllis Schneck and Dorwan Stoddard, Loughner also managed to shatter one of the last remnants of trust in the public commons for my hometown.The extraordinary heroism on January 8th, including the life-saving role by Giffords intern Daniel Hernandez, bolstered the city–and the nation–with a sense of resiliency and bravery in a moment of sheer disbelief.
Memorials grew at the supermarket and at the University of Arizona hospital; testimonies flowed. Neighbors met and chatted. Committees for civility emerged. President Obama soon arrived in Tucson and poignantly addressed a packed arena under the banner, “together we thrive.”One year later, Rep. Giffords will miraculously join Tucsonans on this Sunday for a special candlelight memorial to the victims, as we once again grapple with the still unfinished process of healing and finding some meaning in the fallout of a tragedy.
When we wake up on Monday morning, the real challenge will be whether Tucson, Arizona–and the nation–will still to rise to meet ourselves as neighbors and effectively work to prevent the next tragedy from finding its all-too-easy expression through the barrel of the gun, or recoil back into the divided enclaves of denial and distrust that nurtured the very landscape of this tragedy.
2011 has not exactly been a year to “thrive together” in Arizona. Nor were the Safeway victims the only casualties of derangement and hatred in our state’s borderlands of denial.
Only a month after Loughner’s assault, an Arizona jury gave anti-immigrant militia wanna-beShawna Forde the death penalty for her role in the murder of nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in a botched vigilante-inspired robbery south of Tucson. In July, a Maricopa County Superior Court justice sentenced Phoenix resident Gary Thomas Kelley to 20 years in prison for the murder of 3rd-generation Arizona Juan Varela, after an allegedly drunken Kelley objected to protests against Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 immigration law and threatened Varela to “go back to Mexico” or die.
In September, Attorney General Tom Horne stunned observers at a conference on the state’s ban on the teaching of Mexican American Studies, as he invoked one of the bloodiest episodes in ancient Roman history and demanded that Tucson’s nationally acclaimed Ethnic Studies program “be destroyed.” Arizona state superintendent John Huppenthal followed up Horne’s harrowing pronouncement by referring to Mexican American children in Tucson as “Hitler youth.”
A week after Giffords made a dramatic return to the floor of Congress in the debt ceiling vote this summer, one of the most chilling reminders of Tucson’s denial of its open wound took place at a Tucson Unified School Board meeting in August. A self-proclaimed Tea Party member, who had actively circulated a conspiracy video on Facebook that Giffords’ attempted murder was set up by the Department of Homeland Security, unleashed an inflammatory tirade of a coming civil war and bloodshed over Ethnic Studies in Tucson.
None of these incidents, outside of the Forde murders, garnered any national media attention or even much local discussion, as if a crisis is never a crisis until it is validated by disaster. A prescient admonition by one of Loughner’s fellow students at Pima Community College, who noted his “seriously disruptive” and “scary” behavior in class, remains a cautionary reminder that “until he does something bad, you can’t do anything about him.”
No one has probed the terrain around the Tucson shooting better than author and journalist Tom Zoellner. A 5th-generation Arizonan, a confidant of Giffords and a virtual neighbor of the troubled Loughner, Zoellner reluctantly returned to his hometown soon after the Safeway tragedy. In his new book, “A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America,“ Zoellner set out to transcend the endless political banter over blame and explores the social contexts underscoring how Giffords’ act of democratic participation–”reaching out to strangers at the fringe of a Safeway”–could lead to one of the most disturbing assassination attempts in recent history. In the process, Zoellner asks a lot of questions most Arizonans would prefer to ignore; for starters, given Loughner’s abundant trail of erratic and violent flare ups, including his suspension from Pima Community College for unruly behavior, would a simple gun law requiring a one-hour safety training prior to purchase have prevented his access to a semi-automatic weapon?
Zoellner notes that while the Tea Party-led legislature managed to pass a law declaring the Colt Single Action Army Revolver the state gun in the first session after the Giffords shooting, it also cut $510 million from the state health care budget, including mental health services.
To place all of the blame on one person, mental health care expert Dan Ranieri tells Zoellner, is “so limiting, so naive and almost condescending.” Such a sweeping dismissal, Ranieri concludes, “absolves people of their responsibilities.”But asking who is responsible for such a horrendous crime by a young man medically diagnosed with schizophrenia is a risky endeavor in the politically charged debates over gun laws and lobbies, mental health care and ethnic tension, and the still small possibility of public trust and “communities that care about each other” in 2012.
As I wrote on the day of the tragic killings last year, I cut my political teeth as a 17-year-old intern with legendary Arizona Congressman Rep. Morris Udall, who defied liberal Democrats with his opposition to gun control. Udall told a Harvard crowd during his presidential campaign in 1976: “I don’t claim total courage; I don’t claim total wisdom.”
As Arizonans, I wonder if we truly won’t meet ourselves until we find both the courage and wisdom to end our denial of a still festering crisis.
The clock struck at 1,095 days and 11 hours today for Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Ariz. — or, at least according to the ticking icon on the Phoenix New Times home page that had asked readers for years: “How long has Sheriff Joe been under investigation by the feds?”
That investigation culminated Thursday when the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice released its long-awaited report, which found a “chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations” in Arpaio’s office. Drawing from tens of thousands of documents and over 400 interviews with sheriff’s department personnel, inmates and experts, the report documented “a widespread pattern or practice of law enforcement and jail activities that discriminate against Latinos,” resulting in gross violations of constitutional rights.
Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio at Thursday’s press conference, giving him until Jan. 4, 2012, to accept DOJ’s measures to take “clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days,” or face a lawsuit. Perez expressed DOJ’s willingness ”to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform of MCSO,” adding, “if the will exists” on Arpaio’s end.
That’s a big if. Now a real clock may be finally ticking for the countdown of the nearly 20-year reign of America’s self-proclaimed “Toughest Sheriff.”
One federal department is not even waiting: Within hours of the DOJ announcement, the Department of Homeland Security terminated Maricopa County’s access to immigration status data under the federal Secure Communities program.
The announcement comes amid growing calls for Arpaio’s resignation, in the aftermath of allegations that his department mishandled hundreds of sex crime reports in the Phoenix area township of El Mirage.
Rep. Raul Grijalva was the first to call for Arpaio to step down.
“Mr. Arpaio might love headline-grabbing crackdowns and theatrical media appearances,” the Tucson Democrat said last week, “but when it comes to the everyday work of keeping people safe, he seems to have lost interest some time ago.”
A few days later Rep. Ed Pastor, who represents Maricopa County in Congress, endorsed a call for Arpaio’s resignation. So did nine state legislators. Even Cafe Con Leche Republicans, a national organization, released a statement this week that “Arpaio has disgraced his office and the Republican Party.”
On Monday, religious leaders from 14 mainline denominations called on the attorney general to release its findings and take “immediate action to quell the growing human rights crisis in Arizona,” a reference to Arpaio’s law enforcement regime.
Citizens for a Better Arizona, a new group, which organized the successful recall of Tea Party leader and former state Senate president Russell Pearce in November, organized a major turnout at the Maricopa County board of supervisors meeting on Wednesday to call for Arpaio’s resignation.
“This is a very important day for Maricopa County,” County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, a critic of Arpaio, told supporters following the release of the report. “It’s a day many of us have been awaiting. Let this be the end of Arpaio. Give us a better criminal justice system.”
The 79-year-old sheriff has rarely failed to express disdain for federal oversight, especially from the Obama administration. Last week, Arpaio couldn’t resist tweeting his glee about a dubious report in the Globe tabloid newspaper that his “Cold Case posse” investigation of President Obama’s birth certificate had the first lady “in a panic.”
Two years ago, after Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano had also announced her intentions to terminate the DHS cooperation with Arpaio’s office, Sheriff Arpaio appeared on the Glenn Beck show and openly mocked federal authority. Arpaio claimed that local and state laws allow him to target “some people who have an erratic, scared … whatever … if they have their speech, what they look like, if they look like they come from another country, we can take care of that situation.”
The DOJ report concluded that Arpaio engaged in racial profiling.
“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of the kind identified by the Supreme Court in Arlington Heights,” the report noted, “showing that Sheriff Arpaio has intentionally decided to implement his immigration program in a manner that discriminates against Latinos.”
The report added a telling detail about Arpaio’s effectiveness as a law enforcement officer. While his operations involved “the most egregious racial profiling in the United States,” according to one expert, “enforcement actions rarely result in human smuggling arrests.”
Another law enforcement officer last week levied a similar charge against Arpaio on the botched sex crimes investigations. Bill Louis, former assistant police chief in El Mirage, wrote an Op-Ed in the Arizona Republic declaring that ”Sheriff Joe Arpaio failed these victims. At this point there is little that can be done to undo the harm they have endured.”
Not that criticism or outrage has ever moved Arpaio to veer from the style that has made him a hero to some conservatives: his high-profile immigrant sweeps, his order that prisoners had to wear pink underwear, or his reality TV exploits. Last spring, he simply shrugged off calls for his resignation over allegations of his department’s misuse of $100 million.
Will Arpaio comply with the Justice Department’s demands?
“I’ve seen police chiefs, DAs and others who have been able to reform the system,” Perez said at his press conference today.
But “reform” and “Arpaio” are two words rarely seen together.
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(Update: At a Thursday afternoon press conference, a perturbed but defiant Sheriff Arpaio bristled at the Department of Homeland Security’s revocation of its immigration data agreement with his department. He warned such a move would allow undocumented criminal offenders to go undetected and be “dumped back onto a street near you.” Arpaio suggested that “President Obama might as well erect a sign on our border, [saying] ‘Our home is your home.’” He did not address any of the allegations of racial profiling and civil rights violations in the DOJ’s report.
Nonetheless, Arpaio said that his office will cooperate with the Department of Justice, “to the best we can,” and he thanked the President for injecting immigration into the national presidential debate. ”But don’t come here using me as a whipping boy for a national and international problem,” he said, adding ”I will continue to enforce all of the laws.”
MESA, Ariz. — Almost a year to the day after he took power as the self-proclaimed “Tea Party president” and thrust Arizona’s hard-line immigration and anti-federal laws into the national arena, state Senate president Russell Pearce watched in bewilderment yesterday as an extraordinary citizens campaign of Democrats, Independents and moderate Republicans dethroned him in a historic recall election.
“Today marks the beginning of a new era in Arizona politics,” declared Randy Parraz, the co-founder of the Citizens for a Better Arizona, which spearheaded the recall campaign to great derision last January. “The reign of Senate president Russell Pearce has finally come to an end.”
As the darling of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council and an influential ideologue in the nativist-tinged anti-immigrant movement, however, Pearce is not the only loser in the election upset. With more than 90 percent of his campaign funds coming from corporate lobbyists and out-of-district contributions, allowing him to vastly outspend his opponent, Pearce lost by a nearly 10 percent margin — 53.4 percent to 45.3 percent — to Republican newcomer Jerry Lewis, a moderate Mormon leader who largely ran his grass-roots campaign as a referendum on Pearce’s extremist views.
What happens in Arizona doesn’t stay in Arizona
Pearce’s downfall serves as the opening salvo for the 2012 presidential election and places the hotly charged issue of immigration policy back onto the front burner. Pearce was the architect of the state’s controversial SB 1070 immigration law, which has been embraced by the front-runners in the Republican presidential primary and replicated in states like Georgia and Alabama.
“This is a huge shift for the Republicans as much as the Democrats,” Parraz said last night, in front of the Citizens office in Mesa. “But it will only have a sustainable impact if we continue to get out and do the work, and not sit back and wait for the change.”
Without the support of major organizations or political parties, Parraz and his co-founder Chad Snow launched their recall campaign less than 10 months ago in what many viewed as a quixotic venture. Invoking the “si se puede” spirit of Arizona-native labor leader Cesar Chavez , the Citizens for a Better Arizona inspired a bipartisan campaign of disaffected Republicans, demoralized Democrats who had lost every statewide campaign in 2010, and a bevy of Independents. With an estimated 500 campaign volunteers taking part in door-to-door canvassing efforts, and a full-scale get-out-the-vote operation, the Citizens group signed up 1,150 new voters.
“Immigration issues are not Republican or Democratic,” said Parraz, who went to great lengths over the past several months to stress that the recall transcended a single issue and showcased Pearce’s leadership role in cutting education and healthcare, and overseeing the state’s economic decline. “We have to work together to make effective change.”
Despite Gov. Jan Brewer’s public face on Arizona’s immigration policies, Pearce was largely seen as the de facto governor, who had railed about an “invasion” from Mexico and an immigration crisis on the border to ram through his openly anti-federal and states’ rights agenda on healthcare and gun laws, and an effort to even “nullify” federal jurisdiction. Less than a year ago, Pearce called for the impeachment of President Obama, and claimed the White House was waging “jihad”on the country.
“Russell Pearce is too extreme, but he is not alone,” Parraz said, who has often chastised state and national leaders for allowing the Tea Party figurehead and other hard-liners like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to go unchallenged. “This election shows that such extremist behavior will not be rewarded, and will be held accountable.”
Galvanizing a huge turnout of voters, including largely overlooked Latino communities, which make up more than 30 percent of the electorate, Parraz and his Citizens group have emerged as a powerful political force in the state.
Arizona’s progressive past
On the eve of Arizona’s centennial celebration in February, the recall is a reminder of Arizona’s often-forgotten history. Arizona’s first citizens movement was founded to counter the role of outside corporations and carpetbaggers in the formation of the state in 1912. The movement rallied for the right to recall elected officials who no longer represented their interests in the writing of the state’s constitution. After President Taft approved the progressive Arizona constitution, the state Legislature’s first act made electoral recall an enduring part of Arizona’s legacy.
Today’s slogans about the 99 percent would not have been a surprise to Arizonans a century ago.
“The working class, plus the professional class, represent 99 percent,” said Arizona’s first governor, George W. Hunt, after a major labor showdown in 1916. “The remaining 1 percent is represented by those who make a business of employing capital.”
“It will be a happy day for the nation when the corporations shall be excluded from political activity … and vast accumulations of capital cannot be employed in an attempt to control government,” he declared
With the retirement of Russell Pearce, Arizona is slightly closer to that happy day.
A police officer walks with a man who said he had a child inside of the home where five people were shot Wednesday, May 2, 2012 in Gilbert, Ariz. (Credit: AP Photo/Matt York) 
John Huppenthal (Credit: AP/Ross D. Franklin) 
One year ago in Tucson 
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has seen better days (Credit: Rick Scuteri / Reuters) 
The forcibly retired Russell Pearce, Tea Party leader
(Credit: AP/Matt York) 