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25 ChAPTER IV RETURN To ThE BoRDERLANDS 4 Gerald D. Nash, the preeminent economic historian of the modern West, argued that the region“changed masters”during the Depression,substituting the federal government for its colonial dependence on eastern capital. Yet Arizona relied on large federal spending since the territorial period (1863-1912), when the army provided security for Arizona citizens and markets for Arizona produce and livestock.1 For example, the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 provided for federally subsidized irrigation, including the Roosevelt Dam and the Salt River Project.And the military’s demand for fiber brought on the cotton boom of World War I, which impacted Pima and Pinal County agriculturalists profoundly.The New Deal in Arizona, therefore, was not a radical break with precedent, but instead deepened and broadened Arizona’s dependence on federal funding and influence.By the end of the 1930s federal officials in various agencies were subsidizing agriculture; supervising enormous irrigation projects; regulating grazing and forest harvesting; and dispersing grants, loans, and relief to individuals, businesses, and municipalities. The federal government, incredibly , spent three times the per capita national average in Western states, including Arizona. Much of the federal largesse poured into Arizona’s extractive industries, like copper. Yet federal investment in recreational facilities, highway construction, education, and municipal government, combined with an expanded transportation network, enabled the remarkable urbanization of Arizona during World War II and the postwar era. In 1940 few of my fellow Arizona citizens could have imagined the changes about to take place.The state’s manufacturing industry was in its infancy, and Phoenix,Arizona’s largest city, counted only 65,414 in population .In 1934 a Phoenix-based advertising firm created the phrase“Valley of the Sun” to replace “Salt RiverValley” and to promote tourism in Phoenix and central Arizona. It quickly came to symbolize the dreams of a new and emerging business elite, like Barry Goldwater, Frank Snell, and Walter Bimson, all of whom I worked with during my legal and political career in Adversity Is My Angel 26 Arizona.Though the thirty-five thousand visitors to the Phoenix area in 1939-1940 stayed at or toured the Arizona Biltmore and other new resorts and attractions, the center of power—both political and economic—remained at the venerated Adams Hotel in downtown Phoenix where farmers , mining executives, and cattlemen purchased legislators’ votes and ran the state.Arizona’s political culture at the time—a mix of eastern colonialism , western individualism, and southern Jim Crowism—remained rooted in the extractive economy. I viewed establishment power and politics in Arizona from afar, never imagining that twenty-five years later I would be at the center of it all.2 In the summer of 1939 I was twenty-three years old,a college graduate, and I decided to return to Douglas to become an American citizen and apply for teaching jobs. I remember the citizenship ceremony well, and that day, November 21, 1939, remains one of the most important in my life. I was sworn in as an American citizen in the superior court in Bisbee, the Cochise County seat. Securing a teaching position proved more challenging . The school board, administrators told me, maintained a policy of not hiring Mexican American teachers. A Mexican American teacher had been on the district payroll there for many years, they added, but the board had decided, as a matter of policy, not to hire any more Mexican American teachers. I was an American citizen, but it made no difference. Undaunted, I looked for a teaching job. I applied in Pomerene,Arizona, a small rural community just north of Benson. I interviewed with a member of the school board, and rather than discussing teaching methods or curriculum, he asked if I could ride a horse and rope a steer. I replied that I had applied for a teaching position, not to be a cowboy on a ranching operation. Not surprisingly, the school board turned down my application . I then applied for a teaching slot in Ajo, the copper community in western Pima County. In 1939 the community was segregated, and the Mexican miners lived separate and unequal lives from the Anglo managers of the mine and smelter.That application process proved futile as well, and the position was ultimately awarded to an Anglo American. It seemed that the various school boards in southern Arizona should have advised that “Mexican Americans need not apply.” Realizing the increasing role that the federal government played in all aspects...

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