State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream by Jeff Biggers

Author:Jeff Biggers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Process, American Government, General, State, Political Science, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9781568587042
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2012-09-15T06:29:24+00:00

WE HAVE TO CREATE OUR OWN STORY

Randy Parraz sat in the meeting room of a local union headquarters in Phoenix, a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. above his head. Preoccupied, as if always in the middle of carrying out an action, he fidgeted in his seat, gazing intensely at the camera.

“It’s not where you come from,” he said, speaking at a machine-gun pace, “but what you dedicate your life to.”

Parraz had dedicated his life to his two little girls, which brought him back to Arizona in 2007 after a divorce. He had first arrived in Arizona in 2002, signing on as the state director for the national AFL-CIO, but a career in the labor movement had left him dissatisfied with its effectiveness for change.

“Labor is so beat-up,” he went on, shaking his head. “Lack of vision, lack of leadership, afraid to deal with immigration.”

This frankness about Parraz, his brash take-no-prisoners approach to community organizing, had set him apart from the entrenched but paralytic Democratic establishment in Arizona. He remained the ultimate outsider who riled insiders with his indifference to protocol. Yet his passion and sense of purpose, and his brilliant organizing tactics, had attracted a growing following of young Latinos and liberal baby boomers that inspired a rebirth of activism in the state.

“We have to create our own story,” Parraz offered.

Parraz’s own story was impressive. Raised in Sacramento, California, he had earned a law degree from Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley, then pursued a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Inspired by Ernesto Cortés of the Industrial Areas Foundation and the teachings of Harvard’s Marshall Ganz, a legendary community organizer and colleague of United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, Parraz found himself easing into the stream of community organizing jobs in Texas, Washington, DC, and then Arizona.

When he witnessed the faltering pushback on SB 1070, he shifted from his behind-the-scenes community organizer role to that of a public figure. “There are certain roles you have to take when no one else is ready to take it on,” he said.

Parraz was outraged by the Democratic Party’s failure to “rise to the challenge” in Arizona and confront the misinformation over SB 1070. “They saw it as a burden and walked away. I said, ‘Hey, let’s use this as an opportunity to organize.’ There were a lot of good people in the state who stayed quiet.”

“The signing of SB 1070 was the turning point for Randy Parraz,” the Three Sonorans blog noted, introducing him to Tucson voters in the summer of 2010. “As he said during his interview with Arizona Illustrated, his own personal threshold of injustice had been passed, and there was no strong voice against the bill from the Democratic candidate against John McCain, a supporter of the bill, so Randy decided to enter the race.”

Parraz failed to win the Democratic nomination for the Senate; but as he predicted, the state Democratic Party lost every statewide race. In the meantime, Parraz had awakened the interests of a new generation of activists in the state.

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