How Latino Voters Turned Arizona Blue
![Mijente organizers celebrate in Arizona [Twitter/@conmijente]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21dbb91adde3260d4ba1ef/1605209899709-5IIXND7SMHSFSLYUQUL4/arizona-election)
Mijente organizers celebrate in Arizona [Twitter/@conmijente]
After a week of uncertainty, media networks called Arizona for Joe Biden.
It’s the first time the state has gone blue since 1996 (before that, Arizona last voted for a Democrat in 1948) and Democrats have Arizona’s Latino communities to thank for the win.
According to Mi AZ, a coalition of progressive Latino voter engagement groups, nearly 73% of Latino voters in key precincts voted for Biden, and increased their turnout by 20% in those precincts over 2016. AJ+ senior producer Mara Van Ells interviewed Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Latinx & Chicanx justice group Mijente, about what led to Arizona’s mobilization of Latino voters, and what comes next.
“Arizona foreshadowed what we're facing nationally in the country”
Franco credited the anti-immigrant “show me your papers” law SB 1070 for motivating young people’s organizing. The law, which legalized racial profiling in the state, passed in Arizona in 2010 and was partially struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012. “Arizona in many ways foreshadowed what we're facing nationally in the country,” Franco said, referencing the state’s string of anti-immigration laws and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror (he was ousted in 2016).
“It politicized a whole generation of young people. And from that fight, you had many different organizations born that … focused on voter registration, voter mobilization. You had many people running for office and … organizations doing advocacy work around deportations, around criminal justice issues, around education,” Franco said. Arizona went from being politically “barren” to full of vibrant organizing, she says – “The GOP effectively overreached.”
How did Arizona go from a Republican stronghold to a blue state?
— AJ+ (@ajplus) November 7, 2020
Activists and organizers have been working toward this moment since hardline anti-immigration laws were introduced in 2010. pic.twitter.com/fuCSSgZgAo
“One of my biggest hopes is that we do not let our foot off the gas”
Democracy doesn’t function on “cruise control,” says Franco, and failing to show up during the next four years of a Biden presidency would be fatal for the future of Arizona Latinos. “We look at electoral work as not anything where we're picking candidates who are saviors or candidates who are going to fix everything for us … We are the key.”
“It starts with people getting together”
“Don't feel like you've got to figure out everything in one full swoop,” says Franco. “Find people who have similar mindsets and figure out things you can do that are tangible and focus on real problems, focus on things that actually matter to people around you. I think that the organizing, the work of people taking collective action is the foundational success behind the electoral transformation here in Arizona, and it starts with those kinds of those kinds of acts. It starts with people getting together and deciding they're going to do something.”
Produced by Samantha Grasso and Mara Van Ells