“Our Mexicans”: The Reaction of Arizona’s Entrepreneurial Elite to the Rise of Chicano/Mexican American Activism

This paper explores how Arizona’s entrepreneurial elite reacted to the rise of Chicano activism between 1968 to 1974.  In 1972, Arizona Governor Jack Williams signed legislation that limited the ability of farm workers to organize. Cesar Chavez, noted leader of the farmworker movement, returned to his home state and energized the Mexican-American community.  While his followers and local residents initiated a recall movement against the governor, Chavez commenced a hunger strike on May 11, 1972 that culminated with visits from luminaries like Coretta Scott King. Conservatives, often with agribusiness interests, rallied to support the governor.  The recall effort failed, but in 1974 Arizona elected its first Mexican governor, Raul Castro.  

Arizona’s entrepreneurial elite viewed the Mexican unrest as similar in kind to global de-colonization movements.  The farmworkers struggle was not a domestic affair, but “a struggle with communism for control of the nation’s food supply.” One observer described events to the New York Times as “a struggle to preserve free enterprise from the men who tried to scratch a living from the desert with their bare hands and won” against the hordes “trying to take it all away.” Arizona’s elite unconsciously highlighted that the real issue was societal transformation not farm worker rights. The recall efforts failed, and Arizona’s entrepreneurial elite failed to paint the Chicano and Mexican-American activists as communists or outsiders as they had done in the past.  The election of Governor Raul Castro (a political moderate) and the later political success of many activists symbolize the absorption and accommodation of the Mexican-American community into the political establishment.

This paper places the Chicano civil rights movement in relation to wider struggles of revolutionary nationalism and decolonization in the 1960s, and the impact of civil rights issues on conservatism in the Southwest.