READING
Meeks, Eric
2007 The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona, Chapter
One: Desert Empire. Austin: University of Texas Press
Early Arizona Citizens (excerpt)
When Jesuits established missions in Sonora in the seventeenth century, one
of the groups they came across were the O’odham, who lived in villages and
rancherias stretching from the Gila River for approximately one thousand
miles to the south. The O’odham language is a part of the Uto-Aztecan family,
which includes Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. O’odham speakers came
from widely varying cultures, ranging from the semi-nomadic Hia C’ed
O’odham of the extremely arid region northeast of the Gulf of California to the
sedentary agriculturalists known as the Akimel O’odham or Pimas living
along the banks of the Gila and other rivers. Distinct group identities were
discernible through variations in regional dialects, economic practices, and
cultures, but any notion of a tribal political entity was foreign to the O’odham.
Villages and scattered rancherias were largely autonomous political units,
with temporary unions formed only in times of war or for intervillage
meetings. Residents of each rancheria were related by kinship. Councils of
village men made decisions by consensus about when to plant and harvest,
hunt, engage in war, or practice a variety of seasonal rituals. These councils
were loosely led by individuals called keepers who retained their power only
as long as they earned the respect of their communities.
Two centuries of Spanish colonial settlement affected groups of O’odham
differently, creating further cultural divisions among an already diverse
people. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Jesuit
Eusebio Francisco Kino established missions among the O’odham who lived
along the Magdalena and Altar rivers, in present-day Sonora, and among a
group of O’odham known as Sobaipuris along the Santa Cruz River in
present-day Arizona. These included the missions at San Xavier, Guevavi, and
Tumacacori. Over time, the O’odham nearest the missions and Spanish
settlements adopted certain Spanish linguistic traits, crops (such as wheat),
and livestock. They also merged indigenous religious practices with Catholic
practices, helping to create a distinct brand of folk Catholicism. Some of the
villages adopted political offices introduced by the Spanish, such as the
gobernador (village-level governor). Gobernadores came to rival or even
replace the keepers and served as intermediaries between O’odham villages
and the Spanish government. Unfortunately, Spaniards also introduced
devastating diseases which disrupted many of the old villages and spurred
new migrations. Over time, this process created a broad cultural division
between the more Hispanicized O’odham to the south and along the Santa
Cruz River and the relatively isolated O’odham to the north and west. This
new division would remain important well into the twentieth century.
Post Mexican Independence and Racial Constructions (excerpt)
In the three decades after Mexican independence in 1821, political turmoil led
to the decline of Mexico’s hold on the northern borderlands. In the territory
that would become south-central Arizona, Apaches repeatedly undermined
Mexican colonization efforts. As a result, between 1821 and 1848, the Mexican
government approved only twelve relatively small land grants, far fewer than
in the other northern borderland states and territories of Nuevo Mexico, Alta
California, and Coahuila y Tejas. Over time, the recipients of these grants
either sold some of their land or divided it among members of their extended
families. By the time of the war between the United States and Mexico in 1846,
there were ninety-eight ranches in the fertile land along the Santa Cruz River,
many of which were periodically abandoned due to warfare with the Apaches.
During the Mexican period the indigenous peoples of northern Sonora
increased the intensity of their resistance to Mexican incursions. The declining
military presence and a lack of resources to support the missions and peace
camps led to new tensions between Mexican mestizos and Indians,
particularly with respect to the Apaches, who were renewing their raids and
resistance with vigor in the 1820s. The O’odham also rose up in the 1840s,
gaining a degree of autonomy they had not enjoyed since the seventeenth
century. Because of widespread hostilities, Mexican vecinos in what would
become Arizona were periodically forced to abandon their ranches, and only a
total of about one thousand non-Indian settlers lived near Tucson or along the
Santa Cruz River. For the most part, the Arizona portion of the Mesilla tract,
acquired with the Gadsden Purchase, remained in the hands of its diverse,
indigenous peoples.
In the two decades after the Gadsden Purchase, a small class of Anglo, EuroAmerican, and Mexican-American elites came to dominate Arizona politically
and economically. These elites often justified their subordination of their
Mexican and Indian workers by claiming superiority because of their
European or American heritage and their lighter skin. Sonoran Mexicans had
long pointed to their Spanish heritage as a mark of their superiority. In fact,
many Sonoran Mexicans who were actually the offspring of mixed marriages
denied being so, claiming, as one historian has put it, to be “Spaniards from
Europe” and “disdaining anyone who was not white.” As the United States
tightened its grip on the region through railroad construction and the
industrialization of mining, and because of migration from states to the east,
the economic and political power of the Mexican elite would erode. In the
process a somewhat more distinct racial divide would emerge. Partly because
of diversity within the elite class, it would be inaccurate to suggest that there
was a clear racial order between Anglos, Mexicans, and Indians before 1880. A
small class of ethnic Mexicans shared with the growing Euro-American elite a
high social status and a substantial degree of economic and political power
well into Arizona’s territorial period. As late as 1881 the Tucson city directory
was careful to distinguish between classes of ethnic Mexicans and Indians. It
stated that Barrio Libre, just south of central Tucson, was a “slum district”
inhabited by “Papago Indians” and “lower-class Mexicans,” and that it was not
a suitable area for “cultivated Mexicans.”
Developing Economies and Peonage (excerpt)
Some Mexican Americans, like Estevan Ochoa, initially prospered because of
the developing industrial economy and remained an important political force.
Into the 1870s Ochoa and Mariano Samaniego largely controlled the freighting
industry on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border, while others made their
fortunes ranching and as merchants. In 1870 Leopoldo Carrillo, a Sonorense
(native Sonoran), was the wealthiest person in Tucson. Federico Ronstadt, the
son of a German immigrant and a Mexican woman from a landholding
Sonoran family, emigrated from Sonora in 1882 and founded a successful
wagon-and-carriage business. This economic strength translated into political
clout. In 1875 Tucson citizens by a vote of 187-40 elected Estevan Ochoa mayor.
Mexican-American involvement in territorial politics was less impressive but
still significant. On the first Territorial Assembly of Arizona (1864), two of
nine members were Mexican Americans—Francisco S. Leon of Tucson and
Jose Maria Redondo of Arizona City. Some of the elite investors who
transformed Arizona into a mining empire were neither Anglo nor Mexican.
One of the most important, Henry Lesinsky, was a Jew from central Europe.
He had emigrated first to the Australian gold mines before eventually making
his way to the United States. In Las Cruces he began building up his fortune
by buying grain from Hispanic farmers and selling it to the U.S. government.
He delivered mail and opened a store in Silver City before moving to Arizona.
He soon established the Longfellow Copper Mining Company, hired a party of
skilled Mexican miners, and founded the town of Clifton at the junction of
Chase Creek and the San Francisco River in 1873.
The first Euro-American mining entrepreneurs attempted to adopt the
Mexican system of peonage. Until 1863 southern Arizona was still a part of the
New Mexico territory, which had passed a bill legalizing peonage in 1851.
Charles Poston and Samuel Heintzelman, who organized the Sonora Mining
and Exploring Company, were among the first to hire Mexican workers. In
1856 they paid a party of Mexican miners to help clear out some Spanish mine
shafts near Tubac to explore for new silver veins. They soon operated two
mines in the vicinity, which along with Mowry’s Patagonia mine drew
hundreds of Mexican workers from Sonora. Poston initially purchased the
laborers’ debts from wealthy Sonoran hacendados and then employed the men
in his mine. One traveler to the region commented that the hacendados sold
“their peons—debts—and do not even take the trouble to notify the peons of
the changes which has taken place in their condition, much less take into
consideration their will and consent. Before 1880 the considerable agency of
the ethnic Mexican and indigenous workers themselves prevented the
formation of a strictly racialized class system. Many Mexicans worked only for
brief periods in the mines before returning to their fields in Arizona and
Sonora. They sometimes stole some of their employer’s livestock as payment
for their labor. If the mine owners or overseers attempted to subdue them, the
result could be a violent confrontation. As a result, the practice of peonage was
always unstable.Legal peonage ended altogether when Congress passed a law
in 1867 banning it.
Some Tohono O’odham also worked in the mines, but because they retained
vast territory, farms, and livestock, their lives were not circumscribed by their
experiences as mine workers. In 1864 forty-two Tohono O’odham men worked
at the Cerro Colorado mine. Indian agent John Walker indicated that Tohono
O’odham men often sought employment wherever they could when the water
dried up in their villages. Some went to Tubac “where they [had] the
confidence of the Sonora Mining Company,and readily [found] employment,”
while others worked in various capacities in Tucson. Others worked at mines
at Picacho, Fresnal, and Quijotoa. Poston, however, suggested that the
O’odham “would not submit to the regimentation of the mines and were never
any serious challenge to the Mexicans’ almost complete monopoly of mine
labor.” The evidence suggests that the O’odham could have worked in greater
numbers had they so desired. Poston’s statement that the O’odham did not like
the “regimentation” of mining and Walker’s that they could “readily find
employment” suggest that the O’odham chose to participate at a limited level
in the developing wage economy.
A lack of transportation to national markets kept mining operations small
before 1880, and Lesinsky’s mine at Clifton was no exception. Clifton, which
was on territory recently captured from the Apaches, remained relatively small
before 1880. Lesinsky responded by building his own narrow gauge railway to
carry unrefined ores to the reduction works, but throughout the 1870s, he
never employed more than a few hundred miners. Only in 1877, after
considerable lobbying by Arizona capitalists, did Lesinsky’s future look
brighter. That year, Estevan Ochoa sponsored a bill in the territorial assembly
that granted the Southern Pacific Railroad a charter to build a route across the
Arizona desert.The construction of the Southern Pacific and a new network of
smaller railroads rapidly altered the economy and social structure of the
Arizona borderlands, connecting regional mines to a transnational economy
controlled largely by U.S. capitalists. In addition to the Southern Pacific,
which traversed Arizona in 1880, several others connected the mines and
smelters in Arizona and Sonora to national and international markets. These
lines facilitated the movement of cattle, mining ore, and people back and forth
across the border.
Shifting Ethnic Identities and Power (excerpt)
Ironically, Ochoa’s bill to bring the Southern Pacific to Arizona rendered
freighting, which was his and many of the Mexican-American elites’ most
lucrative business, obsolete. The railroad thus accelerated the development of
a more strictly defined, racialized class system in which Mexican nationals and
Mexican Americans alike found themselves subordinated. By the latter 1880s,
Mariano Samaniego was the only Spanish-surnamed individual remaining on
the territorial assembly. By shortly after the turn of the century, there was no
Mexican-American representation in territorial government. Some Mexican
Americans, like Federico Ronstadt in Tucson, would preserve their relative
affluence by finding ways to adapt but the clear trend after 1880 was toward
the erosion of their economic and political power.
The development of highly industrialized and capitalized mining ventures
also undermined the ability of Mexican and indigenous workers to negotiate
the terms of their labor. Unlike Poston’s and Mowry’s early ventures, the new
projects were characterized by a stricter, racialized class system. In the 1870s
and early 1880s, Chinese immigrants provided most of the manual labor on the
railroads. When the work was completed, some of them remained and were
hired by mining companies, but a wave of nativist resentment over their
arrival soon resulted in their expulsion. The large copper companies began to
utilize labor contractors, or enganchadores, who traveled into Mexico to sign
up displaced Mexican peasants.The workers no longer emigrated solely from
Sonora but also traveled up the Mexican Central Railroad to El Paso, and then
over the Southern Pacific to the Arizona copper mines. By the 1880s the
railroads and copper companies imported their own skilled labor and
managers from other U.S. states and from Europe, while ethnic Mexicans and
Indians filled the lowest-paid, unskilled positions. As a result, in 1890 a
journalist for the Arizona Daily Citizen could write that at Clifton, which had
reached a population of two thousand, ethnic Mexicans and Indians were
relegated to manual labor, and “all skilled workers are white.”Still, even by the
turn of the century, it would be inaccurate to characterize the racialized class
structure in the mining towns as a binary system. According to a government
study on immigration called the Dillingham Report, the workforce remained
stratified between Irish- and Anglo-American citizens, southern and eastern
European immigrants, ethnic Mexicans, and Indians. The complex nature of
this racial hierarchy was apparent in the wage levels in the Clifton-MorenciMetcalf mining district.
There, in 1909, 94 percent of native-born workers whom the Dillingham
commission identified as white earned $3.50 per day or more. What Canadian,
English, German, and Irish immigrants earned was comparable with the wages
of native-born, Euro-American workers. In stark contrast, 93 percent of
Mexican-born workers earned between $1.50 and $2.50. According to historian
James Kluger, two hundred Yaquis also worked at the mines by 1915. If this
number is accurate, the Dillingham commission likely combined the Yaquis
with ethnic Mexicans in its figures, making it impossible to compare wages
between the two groups. In the middle of the wage hierarchy were Italian
immigrants, 78 percent of whom earned between $2 and $3. Wage stratification
was not based simply on different skill levels but on race and nationality.
Native-born and Canadian, English, German, and Irish employees described
as miners and general laborers earned up to twice the wage of the ethnic
Mexican workers in the same positions, and substantially more than Italians.
At the smelters at Clifton and Douglas, where much of Clifton-Morenci’s
copper was processed, the Dillingham Report explained that “the Mexicans are
employed largely at common labor, but whether employed at this or at work of
higher grade, most of which is done by native-born and north Europeans, they
are paid, as a rule, lower wages than those received by ‘white’ laborers
engaged in the same or similar kinds of work.” Sixty-five percent of U.S.-born
Mexican Americans earned less than $2.50 per day, while 85 percent of foreignborn western and northern Europeans earned $3 or more. Racial classification,
rather than nationality, language, or degree of skill, structured the wage
hierarchy. Moreover, this was a multi-tiered rather than a binary or dual wage
system. Indigenous workers, a group almost wholly ignored by most
historians of Arizona labor were often relegated to the lowest-paid manual
jobs, below southern Europeans and ethnic Mexicans alike. Such stratification
occurred on both sides of the border. On Sonora’s rail system, for example,
according to an 1883 census, 810 Yaquis, 664 Mexicans, and 475 EuroAmericans made up the workforce.
Even in Mexico, Euro-Americans held most of the skilled positions and office
assignments, while most Mexicans worked in construction or as translators.
Yaquis held only the lowest paying jobs as track repairmen and construction
workers. The subordinate status of indigenous workers was perhaps clearest at
the Cornelia Copper Company’s mines in Ajo, located within traditional
Tohono O’odham lands near the border with Sonora. There, hundreds of
Tohono O’odham men lived and worked under highly segregated conditions.
The 1920 census lists the majority of “Papagos” at Ajo as general laborers in
the copper plant, “Mexicans” as miners and mine laborers, and “whites” as
skilled workers, managers, and foremen. As in other mining communities, the
company maintained racial boundaries both in the mines and in town, not
only between whites and nonwhites, but also between Indians and Mexicans.
The O’odham were restricted to an area that became known as Ajo Indian
village. Unlike in the Mexican section, the company did not even provide
housing for the O’odham workers, justifying that practice by suggesting that
the O’odham were ephemeral workers, wanting only to earn a little cash
before returning to their own rancherias.
Farmlands and a Racialized Labor Force (excerpt)
Mowry’s vision of an agricultural empire stretching from the Salt River in
Arizona to the Yaqui and Mayo rivers in Sonora was slower to develop than
the mining empire, but by 1880 it was well under way. U.S financing again
largely fueled the transformation in both the United States and Mexico. In
Arizona, agencies such as the Geological Survey, the Army Corps of Engineers,
and the Reclamation Service (renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923)
determined where agricultural development would take place and who would
benefit from it. Race played a significant role in these decisions. As large-scale
irrigation projects led to the rise of mechanized commercial farms, many
ethnic Mexican and indigenous farmers lost access to water through upriver
diversions and erosion. Thousands would find themselves with little choice
but to work for wages in the burgeoning mining industry, on the railroads,
and on new commercial farms. By the first decade of the twentieth century,
then, it became clear that agriculture in the transborder region would mirror,
in many respects, the structure of the copper mines: large, capital-intensive
farms would rely upon a mobile, racially stratified workforce to produce staple
crops for market.
Even with these substantial changes in Arizona’s economy, many ethnic
Mexicans held onto their lands well into the twentieth century. During the
territorial period, the U.S. government confirmed as valid approximately one
hundred thousand of the eight hundred thousand acres of land grants that had
been made before the Gadsden Purchase, most of them along the Santa Cruz
and San Pedro rivers. Moreover, between 1875 and 1901, Hispanic-surnamed
individuals, some of whom had roots in the region stretching as far back as the
eighteenth century, received, 259 patents for homesteads in the territory.
On both sides of the border, ethnic Mexican landholders continued to practice
traditional forms of open-range ranching and farming into the 1900s. Along
the San Pedro and Santa Cruz rivers, members of extended families took
possession of contiguous homesteads, often leaving the land unfenced,
mingling their herds, and cooperating in yearly corridas (roundups). Longtime
resident families included the Sozas, who owned fourteen homestead patents
in one contiguous area, and the Pachecos, whose cattle brand dated to 1818 in
the Tucson and Tubac areas and who owned at least four different patents.
Antonia Wilbur-Cruce wrote in her memoir that three generations of her
family lived together on her father’s ranch just north of the border, raising
goats and running cattle on the open range and growing subsistence crops in
their own milpa (a large garden or small farm). Like other large Sonoran
ranchers, her father claimed pure Spanish ancestry, boasting that he was the
descendent of the “very last conquistador to come to Arizona.” Such claims
were not just about land they were also about race. By claiming pure Spanish
ancestry, wealthier Mexican Americans also claimed whiteness and thus
attempted to distinguish themselves from the surrounding population of
mestizos and Indians.
Industrial agribusiness would soon begin to replace this older pattern of
landholding on both sides of the border. In Sonora, Mexican officials and U.S.
investors alike viewed the fertile Yaqui River valley as a potential center of
commercial agriculture in northwestern Mexico. When the Mexican
government took a comprehensive survey of Sonora in 1849, it found that there
had been very little encroachment into the homeland of the Yaquis. They had
been working for wages in the haciendas and mines near Alamos, Buenavista,
and Hermosillo but still maintained a largely autonomous political and
cultural existence along the river. In the next couple of decades, Mexican
officials began to work concertedly toward ending this older pattern of
communal landholding in favor of private ownership.
Arizonan Governance (excerpt)
As industrial mining and agriculture expanded at the turn of the century,
Arizonans argued that the economy and population of the territory had
matured enough to warrant full statehood. Without it Arizona residents—
Anglo and non-Anglo alike, lacked the power to elect their own governors or
voting representatives to Congress. Yet, as Howard Lamar has shown,
statehood was repeatedly postponed because of disagreements over the
conservation of federal lands, political competition between congressional
Democrats and Republicans, and the belief, which is most important for this
study, held by many national political leaders that New Mexico’s and
Arizona’s populations, because they were largely made up of Mexicans and
Indians, were not fit for self-government. Due largely to the territory’s ethnoracial makeup, powerful government officials such as Indiana Senator Albert
Beveridge hoped to maintain an imperial relationship with Arizona, explicitly
comparing it to new overseas possessions like the Philippines.
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
nonwhites 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. Arizonans began
to press for statehood in earnest in the 1880s and ’90s.
In 1889 Congress initially included Arizona in an omnibus bill to admit the
Dakotas, Wyoming, and Washington as states, but it soon dropped Arizona
from the bill due in large part to the objections of Republicans who did not
want to admit what would likely become a Democratic state. After Arizona
was excluded from the bill in 1891, a group of twenty-one Arizona men
decided to move forward anyway. The spokesman for the effort was Mark
Smith, Arizona’s delegate to Congress. When Smith presented his case before
Congress and President Benjamin Harrison, however, the president responded
that the Republicans were “opposed to the free coinage of western senators.”
This response, combined with the national panic of 1893, ended the territory’s
chances to achieve statehood in the nineteenth century.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the statehood campaign picked up
steam, and statehood was reconnected to the idea of the acquisition of full
citizenship. In 1901 numerous editorials appeared in Arizona newspapers
connecting statehood to “full enfranchisement” and freedom from “territorial
vassalage.” As the secretary of Arizona’s Territorial Democratic Committee
said, “We are all anxious to acquire the full privilege of American citizenship,
to increase our opportunities and to substantially build up the country of our
choice.” He argued that territorial status deprived the region’s inhabitants of
their full liberty as members of the national body politic: “During this
struggle I am seeking citizenship, and I feel as though I express the heartfelt
will of all democrats when I say, ‘God speed the day.” In late October the
participants in a convention held in Phoenix voiced a similar sentiment.
Pointing out that the region had been in a territorial status for five decades,
convention attendees couched their quest for statehood in the discourse of
liberty, citizenship, and self-government.
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 then 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. First, the
assembly passed a .50 poll tax, which undermined the right of many workingclass people, and thus many Mexican-American people, to vote. The Daily
Enterprise, a progressive newspaper, complained that the law opened a door
that might “disfranchise all save the wealthy and privileged classes” to no
avail. Over the next several years, the assembly passed even more explicit
discriminatory legislation. In 1909 it passed an English literacy test for voting.
The Democratic governor at the time, Richard Sloan, protested the measure,
declaring, “It is a wholesale disfranchisement of the respectable element of our
Mexican population who, by all rights of birth, ancestry, identification with
country and treaty rights as well, have a just claim to consideration in any
scheme looking to the curtailment of the privileges of citizenship.” The
measure passed despite his protests. That same year, the assembly passed a
law that segregated “students of the African race” into their own schools. (The
population of blacks in most of Arizona was extremely low, with the exception
of black soldiers stationed in Santa Cruz County.) In 1914 Phoenix would put
teeth into the ruling by establishing a separate “colored High School.” While
Hispanic students, whom the courts generally defined as white, could not
legally be segregated by race, they were often segregated by other means,
particularly by the justification that they were deficient in the English
language.
Despite such measures, opposition to statehood at the federal level remained
strong. The most powerful opponent was Senator Beveridge, who served as
the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. Beveridge used his
position to hold up the omnibus statehood bill in the Senate. In part, his
opposition reflected his Republican Party affiliation, since he feared that
Arizona would tip the balance of power in the Senate toward the Democratic
Party. Beyond that, Beveridge viewed the territories of the Southwest in the
same vein as he viewed the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the
Philippines, in short, as imperial possessions that were inadequately prepared
for self-government. “We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern
our territories without their consent,” he explained in 1898, because “it is ours
to save that soil for liberty and civilization”…
Proponents of separate statehood 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. House Resolution XIV stated:
In behalf of that band of pioneers who have wrung from the savage this fair
land of Arizona, in behalf of the citizens of Arizona who have fought its
battles and developed those conditions under which we now happily exist,
this House resents the imputation that our members or the people of this
territory will ever submit to the proposition that Arizona will consent to any
scheme by which it will lose its identity and name and its grand history that
has been marked by the expenditure of blood, treasure and privation.
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
of successful amalgamation.” The protest placed the racial boundaries of
American identity in stark relief. It maintained that at least certain European
immigrants, who were more similar in their racial and cultural makeup to
Euro-American Arizonans, would likely become good citizens. The same could
not be expected of those of Mexican descent. “Arizona’s population is
distinctly American,” the document read, “composed of people from all parts
of the United States and the best type of immigrants from other countries.
Their ideas of social conditions, Christian civilization, modern progress, and
future development are of the highest” (emphasis added)…
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 non-citizen and nonwhite
workers from the right to vote and work.
Defining Citizenship and Natvitists (excerpt)
Ethnic Mexicans were not the only targets of the nativist assault. Many Anglo,
Irish, and Cornish union men expressed concern about “the lowest type of
Europeans,” referring to the newest wave of European immigrants who were
populating the mining towns. Italian, Spanish, and Slavic workers received,
on average, much lower wages than did native Euro-Americans and northern
and western Europeans. Nativist discourse and unequal wage structures
revealed that the boundaries of whiteness itself were still under contention,
with some groups hovering on its margins. The idea that whiteness would be
made less permeable over the following decades will be discussed in detail in
Chapter 4 as will the fact that even into the 1930s, some Euro-Americans
remained questionably white. Conservative craft unionists petitioned the
constitutional convention to limit the rights of newer immigrants to work in
the mining towns. In 1910 four hundred primarily Cornish, Anglo, and Irish
residents of the mining town of Globe sent a petition to the convention to
require employers of more than five workers in hazardous occupations to hire
no less than 80 percent “native-born citizens of the United States” and
“qualified electors.”
Workers in Bisbee and Douglas filed a similar petition. The petitions were not
only directed at Mexican immigrants, but also at Italians, Slavs, and Spaniards.
Arizona’s Immigration Restriction League supported the measures, declaring
“that some large industrial concerns have denied to American workingmen
their God-given privilege to work in their own country under their own flag,”
and that unless the government acted, “in a very few years Arizona will be an
alien state peopled by an alien race.” In the end, the measure did not pass, but
it would be resurrected shortly after the passage of the constitution. 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. The clause read, simply, “No person under
guardianship shall be qualified to vote in any election.” This clause became
especially relevant after 1924, when the national Indian Citizenship Act
granted citizenship to all American Indians, whether or not they had accepted
allotment or continued to live on reservations. Theoretically, the Indian
Citizenship Law, combined with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to
the U.S. Constitution, should have protected the voting and civil rights of
Indians. However, until the late 1940s Arizona courts would apply the
“guardianship” clause to all of Arizona’s indigenous population, regardless of
political and economic status.
Mexican Americans faced a different set of obstacles to full and equal status as
citizens and workers. The decline of the Mexican-American elite and the
influx of Yaqui and mestizo immigrants from Mexico helped to solidify an
increasingly impermeable, racially defined class structure in which ethnic
Mexicans, whether Arizona natives or immigrants, were subordinated. While
some Mexican Americans continued to build a life around independent
livestock operations or, especially in Tucson, craft and merchant activities,
they were a small minority. Anglos had promoted an image of Arizona’s
citizenry as white, progressive, and racially and culturally homogeneous. Full
political and economic incorporation was thus intricately tied, from the state’s
inception, to racial, economic, and political inequality. Such restrictions were
not simply unfortunate aberrations within an otherwise free society. They
were integral to the very identity and political economy of the new state.
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