Life in Arizona for Latinos and Queers

Oh, please join me and other gays and lesbians as we grovel in appreciation. We've been granted the "right" to pay the city of Phoenix $50.00 so that we have the right to visit each other in hospitals, nursing facilities, etc.

It's the Domestic Partnership Registry. Yay.

We're thrilled. Not.

Do you get the part about how WE have to PAY to be accorded a simple fact of civilized society that hets take for granted--because, for hets, it is granted, free?

This is "equal protection under the law"?

Well djes, here in Arizona, where our sheriff marches Latino deportees through the streets to humiliate and demean them, this is what passes for civilization.

And we pay taxes, too?

Oooooooo Ruh Roh!

Poor ticket sales, expected protests scuttle Bush-McCain fundraiser at Phoenix Convention Center

A Tuesday fundraiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center.

Sources familiar with the situation said the Bush-McCain event was not selling enough tickets to fill the Convention Center space, and that there were concerns about more anti-war protesters showing up outside the venue than attending the fundraiser inside.

Another source said there were concerns about the media covering the event.

Eeeeeeuw. In his home state, even.

Think the Phoenicians know something 'bout they homeboy?

Phoenix City Provides Composters, Yard Carts

I call this cool. (Thanks to KimberlyAnn on FreecyclePhoenix for the tip.)

Especially knowing as we now do that child labor in Mexico puts the onions and tomatoes (among other goodies) on our tables, folks in Phoenix may want to start growing our own.

Well, our very hip City government provides composters and yard carts made of damaged trash bins for just $5. And provides tips on how to compost.

That sounds like a win/win/win to me.

Window on My World

Friday morning.

Mama Java’s, where the décor is Seattle chic cum Goodwill, overlooks a strip mall parking lot. Across the street is Domino’s, Circle K, and Payday Loans. Big Brown just cruised by. The mall is called Gaslight Square. I kid you not.

Here I am in architectural middle America, ugly with palm trees. It’s Phoenix on Indian School Road, and there’s really no excuse. This part of Indian School is just I-surrender ugly.

Mama Java’s at least makes an effort, I give it that. Its butter yellow stucco walls are interrupted behind the counter by four flat black faux pillars, tall thin boxes, really, topped with flat black flared rectangles. In front of the cranberry-colored bar, a mix of blonde café furniture sits on the dirty-gold stained, cracked concrete floor. The bistro chairs are don't-give-a-damn uncomfortable with black vinyl cushions.

A drab plaid Ikea sofa along one wall sits beneath an unframed acrylic painting thematically reminiscent of Orozco but not anywhere near so iconic. Two middle-aged men with wrenches, bent over, wrestling a pipe valve shut. A ghostly naked woman looms over and behind them, arm raised, fleeing. On either side are streams of something --oil?--outside the formal painting proper but part of it, a variant triptych. If it’s oil, I hope they shut it off soon, and I hope the lady can come back. The colors echo everything in this room. Which came first, I wonder.

A black wrought-iron candelabrum sits on a square black laminate coffee table in front of the sofa. Somebody has jabbed five tall, bright red tapers in it. Three lean, tentative. One is snapped, half-mast. It looks like it’s giving us the finger in mute, insouciant grunge.

Along one wall, skinny black shelves of leftover books, everybody’s orphans, keep company with three tiers of large coffee bean bins and an étagère holding tiny frames for sale. One bright red, modernish microsuede armchair sits on a tubular aluminum frame looking hopeful in a motel hooker kind of way.

I’m the oldest semi-sentient being in the room but for one man with hair grayer than mine. He reads the Republic. I can’t imagine why.

Two other laptops are going, slowly, all of us waiting for the java to hit. It’s a musty, sleepy, looking-for-work, kids-in-school, having-a-biz-meeting, mostly 30-something group of 16 souls, enough to keep the business going, I guess. After all, it’s nearly 10 am. In comes a short, stocky brunette with a black porkpie hat crammed down on her head, large burgundy eyeglasses, a paisley scarf and a long skirt. A walking mushroom from the 80s with a tall, thin gay man in lively conversation. I imagine that she's really funny when you get to know her.

I think it’s the Travelling Wilburys on the CD. Mama’s working this morning. To me she looks exactly like Guy Pearce in his Priscilla, Queen of the Desert incarnation, only she has medium-length hennaed black hair and nice breasts. She’s wearing a chartreuse chenille top. It’s sleeveless but it has a rolled turtle-neck. (I don’t like chartreuse since having once been forced to walk past a casket in that color. At a funeral home. In Texas. Does it get any worse?)

But she makes a very good latte and I keep coming back.

Someone younger than I am just complimented me on my new Sony Vaio laptop. I am pleased. Accustomed as I am to the invisibility of middle-age womanhood, I feel found and reprieved even if was the laptop that sparked interest. I guess I'll go home now.

50% of First Phoenix Immigrants were Mexicans

Even as Arizona Rightwingers contort in rage at anyone they perceive to be undocumented -- it's pretty hard to tell by looking -- the Arizona Republic today reports that half the city's first pioneer immigrants were Mexicans.

Ruins and relics found at a downtown Phoenix construction site re-confirm that fact, as if we didn't know that the history of Arizona is permanently conjoined with that of Mexico:

During a four-week dig, scientists found wall fragments dating to the late 1800s - what's left of the first businesses built by Anglo and Mexican settlers. John Y.T. Smith's mill, the Hotel Luhrs and attorney Edward Irvine's adobe and brick buildings were the town's commercial heart during that period.

'We are looking at the very beginnings of the city of Phoenix,' city archaeologist Todd Bostwick said.

Underneath the 19th-century foundations, the team of archaeologists also found the buried remnants of about a dozen prehistoric pit houses. Hohokam farmers who lived in the Valley between A.D. 1 and 1450 probably occupied them, archaeologists say. No human remains were found. . . .

Over the years, floods, silt and wind buried pit houses and pioneer-era buildings under a few feet of dirt.

The building fragments date to a time when only a few hundred people, about half of them Mexican settlers and half of them Anglos, lived in what is now Phoenix.

Early settlers eked out a hardscrabble life. Relations with Native Americans, including the Gila River, Maricopa, Pima and Apache tribes, were sometimes friendly, sometimes tense.

The intersection of Central Avenue and Washington Street was the heart of Phoenix life in the late 1800s, historians say.

Mills, saloons, government buildings, shops and professional offices sprang up in that area.

Experts knew about the pioneer-era businesses, but State Historic Preservation Officer James Garrison said he was astounded by how much was preserved under the parking lot.

Some of century-old walls fragments ran for a dozen feet, and one adobe cellar was practically intact.

'The first two-story building in Phoenix was sitting on top of a pit house,' Garrison said.

Even the Hohokam finds hinted at trade.

Archaeologists found a bracelet made from a seashell that is found only at a tourist destination in Mexico that is familiar to Arizonans.

'We aren't the first to vacation at [Puerto Penasco] Rocky Point,' Bostwick said.

So we're not Anglo. We're White Mountain and San Carlos Apache, Tohono O'odham, Chiricahua, Mescalero, Hopi, Navajo, Havasupai, and Mojave, and Mexican, and African American, Asian, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Japanese, Russian, Portuquese, Guatemalan, French, English, Polish, Malian, Nigerian, Ghanaean. . . you get my point.

So this Pat Buchanan/Minuteman/Russell Pearce business about racial and cultural homogeneity -- and that's what it's really about -- makes about as much sense as it makes humane policy. None.

Like the rest of the Southwest, Arizona derives its massive socio-cultural appeal from the mix of Mexican, Native American, and Anglo cultures. Phoenix got to be the fifth-largest city in the country on the backs of Mexican, Native American, and Anglo people, male and female. And any future we have will be hewn out by Mexican, Native American, and Anglo people, male and female.

If we treated our Hispanic art and artifacts the way we are treating our Hispanic people, our museums, libraries, and special collections would be destroyed, along with the material heritage of the entire state. Even our land is Native American and Mexican. From the point of view of the Tribes, we're all "illegal." You'd think we'd have the common decency to remember that as we try to solve the immigration/security issues.

The immigration and security issues are complex, economically, emotionally, physically, and logistically. But we won't reach workable solutions any faster by dividing and terrorizing a third of our people.

Those who want a genuine workable, just, and long-term solution owe it to everyone to shift the debate from people to policies, to stand up against anyone who demonizes and abuses anybody, and to refuse laws that threaten our common economic stability.

It's been said before: We're in this together, and pretending that we're not is like saying, "Your half of the boat is sinking."