It's hard to believe in the Arizona of Peyton Thomas, Joe Arpaio and "sweeps" — interesting how those trailed off after the sheriff was re-elected — but once upon a time the state elected a Hispanic governor. Raul Castro won office in 1974, a milestone not only for Arizona but for the child of immigrants who grew up in hardscrabble Nogales. His new autobiography, Adversity is My Angel, was written with Dr. Jack August Jr., who has established himself as the dean of modern Arizona historiography.
It was a different state, a small town in many ways. Castro was the first Democrat my mother voted for — as an old Arizonan, she trusted "Judge Castro"… "even though he's from Pinal County." (That he was Hispanic didn't matter). He also benefited from the early-1970s exhaustion with longtime Gov. Jack Williams and sectarian tensions in the state GOP that led to the bloodbath between John Conlan and Sam Steiger. Castro never had an executive temperment, and left the governor's office to become an ambassador. But Arizona has rarely had transformative governors — the Progressive-era constitution vested most power in the Legislature and the uncovered-by-the-media Corporation Commission. Castro's is a life worth study, reflection and celebration.
Most of Arizona then was proud to have one of the nation's first Hispanic governors. Castro was elected at the height of the Cold War. He impishly proclaimed himself "the Yankee Castro." Nowadays, Arizonans would be so stupid and easily led that they would vote against him simply because of his name. Talk radio would say he's the president of Cuba and the duhs and ignos, taking time from hoarding ammo, would believe it.
One of the many tragedies of the vast migration of illegal immigrants in the 1990s and early 2000s, along with the similar migration of Midwesterners who move into new crapola subdivisions and close the gates, has been the swamping of Arizona's rich Hispanic history. It was always evident in Tucson, a culturally Hispanic city (although founded by an Irishman). But it was there in Phoenix, too.
Unlike old Tucson, Phoenix was largely founded and settled by Southerners, including former Confederates. Even in the early 1960s, it was very much a culturally Southern outpost, from the cotton economy to the recently segregated schools. It had a proportionately large African-American population. Yet it had a very old Hispanic base, especially in the barrios that ran from 24th Street west to Central and from Roosevelt south.
These were poor areas, neglected by the city. They were never as deeply established as the Tucson barrios, much less those of East LA. But they were home to generations of Chicanos, with churches, stores, schools and restaurants. Veterans, decorated heroes from World War II and Korea, lived there. Home…when home meant more than a promotional line to sell tract houses. (I worked these areas on the ambulance in the mid- and late-1970s.) The genuine racism to which the residents were subjected — the same prejudice Castro overcame — somehow seems less poisonous than today's vendetta against people with brown skin, undertaken by the state GOP thugs for political gain.
The barrios, already damaged by the horrid Maricopa Freeway, were mostly bulldozed to make a cordone sanitaire for Sky Harbor. When you wonder why Phoenix lacks a Hispanic-American power base, this genuine civic crime looms large. These tight-knit communities were scattered, and then inundated by the new immigrants — setting up tensions that were never revealed to the ignorant Anglos.
Phoenix and Arizona have no history. Sure.
Meanwhile, I read in the Republic about Gilbert celebrating the "win" of a cancer center. Banner Health will build the $90 million clinic and partner with Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. This is less a big deal than it seems — Anderson does these ventures around the country. But it is one more self-destructive act by the balkanized, warring municipalities of metro Phoenix.
The Gilbert venture, along with others in Scottsdale, north Phoenix, Goodyear, etc., further draws the life and potential away from the downtown Phoenix biomedical campus. It languishes as Mayor Phil Gordon continues to court the advanced economies of the Middle East. Sprawl and the political power of affluent suburbs gutted the big city hospitals and forced them to disperse resources. Arizona's struggling biosciences venture had to kow-tow to this inefficient enterprise.
The result will not be a thousand flowers of research blooming. It will merely be a number of outposts serving better-off residents. A state with so many people in God's Waiting Room is a target-rich environment for profit-making healthcare providers. In other words, metro Phoenix is, once again, just a market with consumers.
What's lost is the prospect of a bench-to-bedside, holistic biosciences center, with research, medical schools, pharma, startups, clinics and hospitals all in one spot — with scientists and practitioners rubbing elbows and sharing ideas. Talent and capital, spinning off a real economy. It's these dense nodes that will be the future of breakthroughs and advanced care. M.D. Anderson is one tenant in just such a center near downtown Houston. It's also worth noting that Banner kept Phoenix on a string for a year or more, dangling a hospital for the downtown campus, before withdrawing it. The effect was to kill the county hospital's efforts to locate there. So…nothing.
No wonder even Arizona's recent past is more interesting than its monotonous present.
“What’s lost is the prospect of a bench-to-bedside, holistic biosciences center, with research, medical schools, pharma, startups, clinics and hospitals all in one spot — with scientists and practitioners rubbing elbows and sharing ideas. Talent and capital, spinning off a real economy. It’s these dense nodes that will be the future of breakthroughs and advanced care.”
Excellent idea. Not to mention preventative care. Meanwhile, prospects for a single-payer health care system (opposed by Republicans, but never on the radar of the Democratic National Committee either) go from slim to none.
The latest propaganda salvo is the threat of “rationed care” but we already have rationing, in the form of HMOs and insurers whose bottom line depends on gatekeeper access to medical care and specialist referrals.
Modernity contains a bias that money is the solution to most of life’s problems. This is true whether you’re on the left or right. So, when we saw the old barrios south of downtown, the impulse was to look first at their economic weakness rather than the – to our eyes – invisible web of culture, family and history. I wager this issue would still register blank stares for most people. They were compensated, weren’t they?
Most of them ended up in Maryvale where the rootlessness of post-war America was hardscaped into the cul de sacs and generous lot sizes. All the relative and mixed blessings of intergenerational habitation were quickly waved off. So what if Abuela was two miles down the road instead of next door?
We can’t really quantify the losses when connections are severed and individuals marooned in autocentric subdivisions. True, we’re free to invent new relationships, some of which may survive career peregrinations on Facebook and Twitter.
Maybe it’s an aging hippie’s nervous tic to consider those things that make serious people’s eyes roll. We’re a nation that has to pay the cable bills, after all. So, we gamely push on, our lives propelled in air-conditioned comfort and loneliness.
I am a cowardly right-wing troll who couldn’t muster any comment or argument other than name calling. So now I am blocked and must knuckle-drag back to my tract house and watch Fox “News.”