Arizona precursors of Gov. Brewer, Sen. Pearce & gang

Official racism is hardly new in Arizona. The following quotes are from Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona, by Eric V. Meeks. (University of Texas Press, Austin)

'Throughout the two-decade struggle to become a state, Anglos in Arizona honed an argument for an end to territorial status based on the ideas that the majority of residents were white, educated, and civilized and that the indigenous and ethnic Mexican populations would have little role in government. As Arizonans sat down to write a constitution, this argument manifested itself in explicit, exclusionary policies designed to relegate non-whites and those who did not speak English to second-class citizenship. In large part, then, the quest for statehood led to the development of a clearer definition of the ideal Arizona citizen in cultural, historical, and racial terms. Racial inequality was not simply an unfortunate corollary to full statehood; it was built into the very identity of Arizona from its inception ...

'Statehood proponents contended that the educated "American" population--which, it became clear, did not include the indigenous and Mexican-American populations--would dominate Arizona culturally and politically. When Congress considered a new bill to admit Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona as states in 1902, congressional delegate Mark Smith declared before the U.S. House, "The fact is, that excluding the reservation Indians, who are not and cannot become citizens, Arizona has the best generally educated population in the United States." Smith pointed out that most people in the territory had been born in the eastern part of the country--a fact that distinguished Arizona from neighboring New Mexico, which had a much larger Mexican-American population. "The large body of our people," he said, "came when fully grown from the different states of the union. They know the duties of citizenship as well as the members of this house, and they have attended to those duties with a modesty and propriety which I am justified in commending as an example for the emulation of eastern states."

'Smith's reference to Americans from eastern states served to delineate racial and cultural boundaries--a discourse that would manifest itself in a series of restrictive laws passed in the early 1900s by the territorial assembly ...

'In the years that followed, rather than directly challenge [Indiana Senator] Beveridge's characterization of Indians and ethnic Mexicans, Arizona's political and economic elite argued that if the territory were admitted separately [i.e. not joined with New Mexico as a single state, as originally proposed], these groups would have little cultural or political influence ...

'Proponents of separate statehood [for Arizona] bolstered their case by clearly defining, in cultural, racial, and historical terms, the ideal Arizona citizen. The territorial assembly told a racist and gendered story of the region's frontier history, in which manly pioneers had wrested control of the territory from its uncivilized and unmanly Indian and Mexican predecessors ...

'When a jointure bill passed the House in 1906, Arizona delegates refined their race-based argument for separate statehood and clarified who would and would not be eligible for full citizenship. In February they presented a lengthy protest to the Senate. On the front page of the document they explained that they would not accept jointure because of "the decided racial differences between the people of Arizona and the large majority of the people of New Mexico, who are not only different in race and largely in language, but have entirely different customs, laws, and ideals and would have but little prospect for amalgamation." ...

'Arizona's constitutional convention and new state legislature fulfilled implicit promises to limit political and economic rights along racial and cultural lines. During debates over the constitution, the number of Mexican immigrants in Arizona grew, driven largely by the upheavals of the Mexican Revolution and a rising labor demand. One organizer for the Western Federation of Miners complained that "the American citizen, to a large extent, had been driven out of these mining communities." Sentiments such as this fueled the rise of a new coalition, made up of craft union members, small farmers, and merchants, who led a nativist assault against Mexicans. As the delegates met to write up a constitution, they designed more policies to restrict noncitizen and nonwhite workers from the right to vote and work ...

'The new constitution also included a measure denying suffrage to Indians, more explicitly excluding them from full membership in the national polity than any other ethnic group ...

[And from earlier in the book:] Before 1924 most Arizona Indians were not citizens but had a special status as wards of the state ... Arizona's courts consistently applied this restriction to the indigenous population ... Until the Supreme court struck it down in 1948, the Arizona law enforced the notion that Indians, as long as they remained dependent on the state, were not yet ready for full and equal citizenship.'