“The Best Kind of People”: Shifting Definitions of Citizenship and the Making of Arizona
Art by Jia Sung. Read more of our new series on American mythology, Rewriting the West.
The story of Arizona is rooted in fear. Its reputation, branded in the national consciousness, is one of intolerance and oppression of brown people. Arizona is where Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed toughest sheriff in America, paraded prisoners in pink underwear in front of the clicking cameras. Video rolled and journalists scribbled down notes that described the scene, but hardly captured its horror.
For years, I wrote antiseptic stories about these men forced to wear pink, my outrage safely packed away in the interest of the prevailing notion of objectivity. The “immigration stories,” often tragic and heartbreaking, fit within a certain well-worn frame. I wrote stories about undocumented immigrants taking precautions in the event they were detained and deported, a daily threat in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, where one in four residents has a skin like mine. There was a story from inside a warehouse full of migrant children who had crossed the border alone.
Such stories often followed a plotline of who does and doesn’t belong, an us-versus-them popularized by Arpaio and magnified by the President in ranting tweets speckled with typos, that impose a narrow, two-dimensional definition of citizenship in a multidimensional state. Arpaio’s discriminatory approach to law enforcement—a federal judge found that he and his deputies had targeted Latinos in traffic stops and crime-suppression operations—ruled county streets and jails, earning him a faithful following among fearful white voters, who kept him in office for twenty-four years and shaped the state’s political image. His legacy is built on the foundations of the abuse he allowed to fester among the sheriff’s deputies who worked in the jails and patrolled the streets, the many millions of taxpayer dollars paid out in settlements to lawsuits, and the lives he upended with his wanton approach to law enforcement.
I often tell my students about the power of words and how much they matter—how much the way we describe people defines them to the world, which is perhaps a writer’s most awesome responsibility. Through the words and pictures that we paint in people’s minds, we can construct alternate realities where one’s place in society’s stratified totem pole is determined by where they’re from, how they talk, and their hue. We can believe, for example, that Greeks and Romans were as white as the marble statues we see in the finest museums, even though archeologists and other scholars have proven that these were, in fact, originally tinged in vivid colors. In “The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture,” her article in the October 29 issue of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot writes eloquently about the political and moral implications of what she calls “the cult of the unpainted sculpture” and the fallacy of “an unblemished lineage of white Western culture” stretching back centuries. She tells us that “bronzed skin was associated with the heroes who fought on battlefields and competed as athletes, naked, in amphitheaters.”
In Arizona, I see these bronzed heroes in the brown-skinned young immigrants whose personal narratives defy the notion that citizenship must apply exclusively to those who are born here or who are granted the privilege
