|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
Alfredo Gutierrez's father, a US citizen, was deported to Mexico
from his Arizona hometown--the mining town where Alfredo grew up.
This occurred during a wave of anti-immigrant hysteria stoked by
the Great Depression, but as Gutierrez makes clear, in a book that
is both a personal chronicle and a thought-provoking history, the
war on Mexican immigrants has rarely abated. Barack Obama now
presides over an immigration policy every inch the equal of Herbert
Hoover's in its harshness. His family experiences inspired
Gutierrez to pursue the life of a Chicano activist. Kicked out of
Arizona State University after leading a takeover of the
president's office, he later became the majority leader of the
Arizona State Senate. Later still, he was a successful political
consultant. He remains an activist, and in this engrossing memoir
and essay, he dissects the racism that has deformed a century of
border policy--leading to a record number of deportations during
the Obama presidency--and he analyzes the timidity of today's
immigrant advocacy organizations. To Sin Against Hope brings to
light the problems that have prevented the US from honoring the
contributions and aspirations of its immigrants. It is a call to
remember history and act for the future.
Politics, like poker, requires timing and risk, and Burton Barr of
Arizona knew it. The deal maker of Arizona politics would say,
""You gotta know when to hold them."" For more than two decades,
Barr played his political cards with skill as he led Arizona
through an era of enormous growth and success. Considered perhaps
the most influential person in Arizona's political development,
Burton Barr represented north central Phoenix in the Arizona House
of Representatives for the twenty-two years from 1964 to 1986. As
the Republican House Majority Leader for twenty of those years, he
left his fingerprints on every major piece of legislation during
those decades, covering such issues as air pollution, health care
for indigents, school aid, the tax code, prison reform, child care,
groundwater management, and freeway funding. Burton Barr's
political life unfolded during the very time his state and region
shifted from being outliers to trendsetters. His choices in policy
making and his leadership style were both an outcome and a creator
of his sociopolitical environment. Arizona politics in the 1960s
and '70s was a rich brew of key elements, a time when the economy
was being transformed, the nature and distribution of populations
shifted, partisan politics were in flux, and the very lifeblood of
the West-water-was being contested under increasing pressures of
usage and depletion. How Barr successfully responded to those
challenges is the story of Arizona's development during those
years. At the heart of it, Barr's political life and personality
are inextricably bound up with the life of the West.
|
|