The Specter of Statehood: Inventing Arizona in Charles D. Poston's Building a State in Apache Land and Marie Clara Zander's "The Life of an Arizona Pioneer"

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.

—Eric V. Meeks (37)

In his 1902 classic Western novel, The Virginian: A Horseman on the Plains, Owen Wister's famous Virginian pronounces, "Well, Arizona's no place for amatures [sic]" (23). Over one hundred years later, his words still ring true, as the state has become the beleaguered battleground of national debates about the physical and cultural borders of the United States. Although some have characterized the state as exceptional, the widespread popularity of its legislation demonstrates that Arizona's contentious political atmosphere registers much broader anxieties about the malleability of national borders of inclusion and exclusion.¹

Arizona has been a flashpoint for national debates about citizenship and belonging since its incorporation into the United States at the end of the USMexican War. Unlike neighboring gold-rich California, which was swiftly granted statehood, Arizona languished in territorial status for sixty-four years from 1848 to 1912. During this long waiting period, Arizona territorial leaders from both political parties, including Democratic Governor C. Meyer Zulick, Republican Pinal County Councilman Richard E. Sloan, and Democratic Congressional Delegate Marcus A. Smith, actively lobbied federal lawmakers who remained suspicious of granting statehood to the southwestern territory (Pry, "Statehood" 399-400). These national policymakers' hesitation stemmed from anxieties about the territory's demographics, namely its Mexican and Mexican American population.²

In response to this hesitation, Arizona's territorial leaders launched a rhetorical whitewashing campaign, claiming that the state's ethnic Mexican population was quantitatively and qualitatively insignificant and would pose no political, cultural, or economic threat to US-Anglo hegemony.³ This characterization of Arizona as a terra nullius discovered and developed by Anglo pioneers became the foundational fiction of the state, "built into the very identity of Arizona from its inception" (Meeks 37).⁴ Territorial leaders minimized, negated, and even erased Arizona's Native, Spanish, and Mexican history, replacing it with a new history that featured US-Anglo pioneers at its center. Territorial literature was central to this replacement project, as Anglo pioneer narratives became a crucial component in the refashioning of the would-be state's identity. Seeking to quell national fears and assure a clear path to statehood, Arizona's Anglo territorial literature strategically introduced the people of this still largely unfamiliar land to the rest of the nation. This introduction was more fiction than fact, shaping the complex multi-ethnic reality of this highly contested space into a simplified and nonthreatening narrative of Anglo pioneer expansion.

Although these Anglo pioneer narratives were fictional, their impact was very real. The nature of this impact becomes clear in the comparison of two pioneer narratives that both claim to tell the true history of the state's founding: Building a State in Apache Land: The Story of Arizona's Founding Told by Arizona's Founder (1894) by Charles D. Poston, one of the territory's most well-known figures, and "The Life of an Arizona Pioneer" (1923) by Marie Clara Zander, a Mexican American student at the Tempe Normal School, what is today Arizona State University. Together, these texts demonstrate the complex political, economic, and cultural consequences of Arizona's whitewashed foundations. On the surface, they appear to provide opposing definitions of the true Arizona pioneer. In his text, Poston establishes US-Anglo pioneers as the principal developers and inhabitants of the Arizona Territory. Although he mentions Native Americans and Mexicans as relevant to understanding Arizona history, he narratively marginalizes the state's non-Anglo communities, creating a foundationally false pioneer fiction that defined the real Arizonan as Anglo.⁵ Zander, in contrast, appears to champion Arizona's multi-ethnic past by making her titular Arizona pioneer her own Mexican grandmother, challenging Anglo pioneer fictions...