I don't typically write posts like this on this blog, but when issues like this arise there's no room for subtlety at all. I lived in Yuma, Arizona, between the ages of 10 and 18, from 1980 to 1988, and my experiences in that environment shaped my understanding of the state's politics and economics. Because my personal experiences in other parts of the U.S. have proven to be so much less disturbing in comparison I have most often downplayed just how horrific the political and economic powers in that state were (and apparently still are). I suppose I was just grateful to be able to move away to more humane environments populated by others who had much more compassion for those less financially fortunate.
But this story on Huffington Post about Arizona's new immigration law is just too Orwellian to ignore. Most sane individuals seem to conceive of Arizona's immigration politics as racist. Yes, they are. But they are far more insidious than that. This is more an issue of class than race as far as I can tell. Under this new immigration law, schools will lose state funding if they offer courses that "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."
On the surface, it seems "merely" racist, but the implications of the use of "ethnic solidarity" in this new law seem to indicate that Arizona lawmakers are trying to thwart any threats to the state's long-standing practice of exploiting cheap ethnic labor. I say that because I witnessed first-hand how immigrant labor was exploited and abused by wealth while working in industrial farm fields harvesting watermelons and grapes with migrant laborers in the late 80s. It seems to me that the thinking of lawmakers is that if there is solidarity amongst ethnic immigrants and those culturally different then there is the possibility of those classes exercising their political rights to free assembly, to organize as a group, as a collective, as a political and economic power. Labor standing up to ownership in order to demand fair wages and basic human rights? Arizona's legal answer to that possibility is a resounding "Fuck no!" Businesses love Arizona because it's the next best thing to operating in "third-world" countries without substantive labor laws or environmental protections. As I said before, this is far more about class than it is race (not that the two can really be isolated in that state because historically the Mexican immigrants--legal and "illegal"--have been exploited as cheap labor).
The closest thing I've written on this blog about this issue is my entry titled "Illegal Mexican Immigrant Socrates." What I was exploring in that piece was the impotence of philosophy, reason, and logic in the face of abusive power. "might makes right" in Arizona politics and economics. The nuts and bolts of the state's laws and law enforcement practices reflect the influence of the state's wealth. The best way to understand the state's approach to politics or economics is as an authoritarianism designed to maintain the status quo in relation to industrial agriculture and defense contracting.
Now, that might seem counterintuitive given the rhetoric of "individualism" and "individual rights" that spews forth from politicians and business leaders in the state. The quote from above is a perfect example of that rhetoric. In one breath, they present a contradiction by imposing an authoritarian will against the individual, denying the possibility of an individual student's choice to learn about ethnicity, collectivism, and any alternative form of political philosophy or cultural identity by creating an educational climate that financially punishes schools that offer ethnic studies classes in their curricula. And this new law also rejects the "individualism" of persons who speak English with an accent (those who learned English as a second language) by denying them the right to teach English in Arizona schools.
This contradiction, the authoritarian cult of "individuality," is one of the pillars of the unspoken but very real religion of Arizona: maintaining historical power dynamics between wealthy ownership and impoverished labor. As I said, it's a rhetorical contradiction that in practice is quite coherent: "Individualism," as framed by Arizona lawmakers, in a state of economic and political inequality benefits the few who have amassed the greatest wealth and political power at the expense of the rights and well-being of the poor and culturally different. Such a philosophy ensures an eternal recurrence of the state's historical status quo: wealth's position of power is strengthened for its self-interested perpetual benefit while the position of weakness of the masses of financially, politically, and legally impotent laborers becomes ever more entrenched.
To add insult to injury, there is also the notion that those being exploited have only themselves to blame for their misery, as if the impositions of state law and policy do not create an institutional hierarchy of social and economic injustice. The unspoken implication is that the impoverished and culturally different could liberate themselves from their suffering by simply changing their attitudes and dutifully submitting to the abhorrent ethics of the state's wealth and power. A potential "escape" from this otherwise inevitable indentured servitude is presented rhetorically to the public by talk radio personalities and newspaper editorials for those who are willing to assist the exploitative practices of entrenched ownership and political power by practicing an antagonism toward the weakest and most vulnerable residents and laborers in the state. In other words, if you are willing to become "one of us" by abusing these "evil others" then perhaps you may eventually share in the spoils of dominance. Perhaps. No guarantees. Because of that, it's just a way to encourage the poor to police themselves by internalizing the dominant ideology of the state.
Arizona also suffers from a bizarre and disconcerting religious dynamic that supports the class/race division in the state. While it's far more complicated than what I am presenting here, I recall two extremes in the state: on one hand, there was the Mexican and Mexican-American mystical Catholicism that was centered on the practiced ideals of family and community and, on the other hand, there was a strange alliance between the white WASP-like pseudo-mystical Protestant evangelicalism and the white WASP-like pseudo-mystical Mormonism that was rhetorically centered on ideals of individuality, self-reliance, and merit-based accomplishment (while, in practice, the alliance acted in an insular fashion that had nothing at all to do with individualism, self-reliance, or merit-based accomplishment).
The enforcement of the state's draconian drug laws also seemed to ensure the continuation of the dominance/submission dynamic between wealth and the ethnic working poor. The laws were enforced in an uneven fashion through the almost exclusive focus of the state law enforcement's attention on the poor. The relative absence of property ownership and the grouping of ethnically and culturally different peoples in centralized and easy-to-isolate pockets of poverty made it easy for state law enforcement agencies and personnel to target, harass, and control those populations. Amongst the poor, the ethnic poor in particular, these tactics created an even greater sense of helplessness and hopelessness, a sense that the poor and the brown-skinned have few if any rights, no recourse to the law, and were, essentially, slaves to aggressively hostile agents of political and economic power. The criminal justice system, like all institutional powers in Arizona, functioned as an ally of wealth against the interests of the poor and culturally different.
In that sense, there is nothing new going on here at all. This is just another wave of terror against a class of individuals who have been historically abused and exploited by wealth and political power in Arizona.
Fuck Arizona. Pinche putos.
