‘We Can’t Let Up’: Arizona’s Midterm Battle

Latino USA

My Cultura, Futuro and iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2022

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a traditionally Republican state, Arizona hadn’t seen a Democratic presidential candidate win since 1996. But then, in 2020, the state became a battleground. Voters chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump with a difference of just 10,000 votes. Much of that shift in politics is attributed to a grassroots progressive movement of young Latinos and Latinas, who mobilized hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls in the 2020 election. This movement was built from the ground up more than ten years ago, initially in response to Arizona’s racist anti-immigration law SB1070. But now, at a moment when the movement should be riding the high of their recent victory, its members are facing a challenging upcoming midterm election.

On this episode of Latino USA, we travel to urban and rural parts of Arizona to follow three progressive organizers facing an increasingly popular far-right movement of Trump-endorsed candidates—and their fight to expand voting access in the state.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We can't let up, we can't let up because we still have a long way to go and even if
0:12.8	you win a big prize, folks are like, what's next, what else can you do?
0:17.6	You know, yeah, you got 2020, all right, how much bigger can you get?
0:25.3	From Funturo Media and PRX, it's Latino USA, I'm Mariano Jose.
0:30.3	Today, the decades-long grassroots movement that has transformed Arizona and a new fight,
0:37.3	protecting voting rights ahead of the midterms.
0:44.7	I'm elected by the people of Maricopa County, in which fight awaited, almost like the
0:49.1	10th city, because I've been reelected five times.
0:52.3	This clip is from an interview I did in 2012 with Joe Arpio, he's the former sheriff of
0:59.5	Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona.
1:03.7	Arpio was in office for more than 20 years.
1:06.0	We have convicted and doing our time.
1:09.2	Back then, I visited his open air jail tent city, a place that incarcerated hundreds of
1:16.4	people arrested by his department, many of them Latinos and Latinos.
1:22.8	Delphine Emanuel is serving three months and said she too is shocked by 10th city.
1:28.5	I've never seen anything like this, there's 122 degrees out here at times and they just
1:32.7	have us out here just.
1:35.5	But Arpio wasn't the only one pushing a racist agenda.
1:40.0	In 2010, then Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, a Republican like Arpio, signed into law Senate
1:47.0	Bill 1070 or SB 1070.
1:51.1	We worked to solve a crisis that we did not create and the federal government has refused
1:56.8	to fix.
	...

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