South Africans got it right when they made “kuning,” the isiZulu word that roughly translates to “it’s a lot,” one of the defining words of 2023.

It was a lot this year.

2023 seemed an epoch of crises: the highest number of global conflicts in three decades, myriad climate disasters that claimed more than 12,000 lives, and the erosion of democracies worldwide.

Amid all of it, Zócalo was here—sifting through the pressing stories and providing context, perspective, and humanity.

Our favorite 15 essays of the year, selected by the Zócalo staff and you, our readers, remind us that even in overwhelming times, people forge ahead. They think deeply. They ask questions. They create. They build community. And they even have some fun.

May you enjoy revisiting these writings as much as we did, as we ready to ring in a new year.

Boxers Know the Power of an Entrance

By Rudy Mondragón

Can anyone make an entrance like a boxer? Before moderating the Zócalo panel “What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?,” scholar Rudy Mondragón made the case that the boxing ring entrance is the most important ritual in sport. More than a mere act of bravado, he writes, a ring entrance communicates everything from pride to dignity to political protest—in just a few ephemeral, glittering, bombastic moments.

A boxer’s entrance is more than just flash. It’s how they make their mark in the sport and the world, scholar Rudy Mondragón writes. Above, William “El Gallo Negro” King wears a Mexican sarape with a rooster and a sombrero de charro, embracing his Afro-Mexican roots. Photo by Rudy Mondragón.

How Is a Poem Like a Political Campaign?

By Derek Mong

Most of us haven’t given much thought to how poetry and political campaigning might be alike. But Zócalo contributing editor Derek Mong, who won a National Arts and Entertainment Journalism award for this essay, has given it serious thought. Aside from the obvious—that “both benefit from a clipboard”—he unearths deeper threads tying the pursuits together.

My Work as an In-Home Caregiver Shouldn’t Be This Hard

By Alva Rodriguez

Alva Rodriguez is one of more than 550,000 caregivers in California’s In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program—workers who help an estimated 650,000 disabled, blind, or elderly Californians continue living in their own homes. Writing from Fresno for our The James Irvine Foundation-funded series “What Is a Good Job Now?,” Rodriguez describes the deep precarity of the job—“one of the toughest and worst-paying you will find”— and reflects on ways to improve this essential line of work.

What Mourning Looks Like in Monterey Park

By Wendy Cheng

On January 21, 2023, a gunman opened fire and killed 11 people at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, resulting in the deadliest mass shooting in Los Angeles County history. Wendy Cheng writes about the outpouring of community support and solidarity in the wake of the attack, and the ways a public memorial for the victims reflected the city’s unique multiethnic and multiracial history as a home for “immigrants and lost ones.”

Whose Sedona Is It, Anyway?

By Tom Zoellner

During the pandemic, Sedona, Arizona, temporarily stopped advertising in high-end travel magazines. In the place of well-heeled visitors have come day travelers and overnighters from nearby cities that some residents say are destroying “Slo-dona”—and the town finds itself stuck in a fierce debate about whether it should “yank back the welcome mat to the middle class,” writes Tom Zoellner. Published in the fall, the piece generated enough chatter that just recently the city and the chamber of commerce put out a joint statement in response.

Intellectual Snobbery is for the Birds

By Tim Birkhead

Ornithologist Tim Birkhead shares how an encounter with a hobbyist birdkeeper who breeds bullfinches (who are, if you aren’t aware, “humbly endowed”) led him down a new line of research into the phenomenon known as sperm competition, and a better understanding of reproduction in birds. While the subject of Birkhead’s essay might make a middle schooler giggle, the story itself makes a powerful point: Researchers need to listen to people outside academia’s ivory tower.

Tim Birkhead, one of the world’s leading bird biologists, shares why being open to learning from people outside of academia’s ivory tower—in this case hobbyist birdkeepers—can lead to “unexpected and exciting results.” Photo by T.R. Birkhead.

Dianne Feinstein’s Most Important Job Was an Unofficial One

By Joe Mathews

Zócalo columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews has made some big proclamations this year. That San Diego is California’s “finest college town.” That we should call it the California, not the Colorado, River. That the Santa Cruz otter absolutely should have bitten back. But one of his most memorable takes came in the wake of Dianne Feinstein’s death. Reflecting on her long tenure in U.S. political life, Mathews makes a case that her greatest role in office was as California’s “last ambassador to the American government.”

Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later

By Margaret Burnham

For two years, Zócalo has worked on a project supported by the Mellon Foundation that asks: “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?” This essay by Margaret Burnham, director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, shows how such reckonings can lead to action and change through the story of John Henry James. In 1898, James, a Black man in Virginia, was accused of raping a white woman, murdered by a lynch mob, and posthumously indicted for assault. Burnham details how, 125 years later, a judge dismissed the indictment thanks to a campaign by historians, lawyers, and community members. The decision opens a “path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females,” Burnham writes.

The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago

By Mike Amezcua

Historian Mike Amezcua explores the parallel struggles of mid-20th century Black and Latino Chicagoans overcoming segregation and making space for their communities. “This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King,” Amezcua writes. “But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history.” Readers were passionate about Amezcua’s piece, writing it in as a favorite in our audience survey.

My Mom is Out of Prison, But I’m Still Not Free

By Angel Gilbert

Most young people look forward to college as a time of independence, but when Columbia University student Angel Gilbert started school, she had already been on her own “for far too long.” In her Zócalo essay, Gilbert, one of millions of young people who have had an incarcerated parent, shares what it was like to grow up with a mother behind bars. “My emotional pain will never truly heal,” she writes. However, she adds that once she reaches her goal of becoming a lawyer, all of her experiences ensure that she will fight harder for her future marginalized clients.

Destined to Be Trans, Muslim, and Indonesian

By Amar Alfikar

Growing up in a traditional Muslim neighborhood in Java, Indonesia in the 1990s, Amar Alfikar, a trans man and activist, shares how he leaned into family and faith to understand—and embrace—his true identity. “If it was not for my family’s acceptance, I would have left my religion,” he writes. “Instead, I am pursuing an academic career in theology and religious studies and have become firm in my faith and thinking about gender diversity in Islam.”

Can Two Friends Agree to Disagree on Abortion in Post-Roe America?

By Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox

Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox found sisterhood raging about injustice—but they disagree about abortion. Read how they’ve worked to maintain their bond in post-Roe America. “Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree,” they write, “that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.”

Where I Go: The Candy Wrapper Museum

By Darlene Lacey

Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting old candy wrappers. Eventually, she turned her hobby into an online museum. For our series “Where I Go,” she gives truth to the adage that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and shows the power of appointing ourselves as the curators of the things that matter to us the most.

Candy Wrapper Museum curator Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting for her “roadside attraction.” Building the online museum has led to all kinds of surprises—including being sent a Necco scrapbook saved from a dumpster (pictured above). Courtesy of author.

Zócalo’s Diaspora Jukebox

As part of Zócalo Public Square’s 20th birthday celebration, we’ve been sharing the sounds of the Southland with “Diaspora Jukebox,” a series of playlists that celebrate the unique communities and musical traditions that represent greater Los Angeles. Our first “drop”—which had us moving to the rhythm of the city, dancing like it was 1982, and partying like a Zacatecano—culminated in an IRL dance party we threw at the Port of L.A. 

The Human Costs of Building a World-Class City

By Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap

And, drumroll please: Our first-ever audience choice award goes to authors Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap! They take a clear-eyed look at New Delhi’s effort to “polish” the city ahead of this year’s G20 summit, at the expense of poor and working-class people. “Rather than improving life in the city for everyone,” they write, “the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.”

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2023 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’d think that a town dependent on tourist dollars could never stop advertising itself. But in Sedona, Arizona, as wealthy residents’ weariness of riffraff jamming up their roads sparked a bitter rift over what constitutes “the right kind” of visitors, that’s just what has happened.

After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sedona’s city government and chamber made a joint agreement to quit advertising the town in glossy national travel magazines and doing social media posts targeted at rich people, reasoning that such money would be wasted during an international shutdown. The pause sparked infighting, which then escalated: In April 2023, the chamber of commerce’s board voted to end its tourism contract with the city over the council’s refusal to fund “destination marketing.”

The experiment has not yielded the expected serenity.

Instead, Sedona has filled up with “wayward and lost tourists,” in the words of Christopher Fox Graham, managing editor of the Sedona Red Rock News. Without such destination marketing, he wrote, “Sedona has been beset by day travelers from Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas, and Californian overnighters who roll into town with little guidance on where to stay, eat, shop or explore other than what they saw on Instagram.”

One of the reasons for these visitors from nearby cities—and one of the headaches for the many retirees who would prefer that Sedona be more “Slo-dona”—is that more than a third of the city’s homes are used for short-term rentals. That fact led the city council to require, starting in 2022, an annual permit for lessors and mandatory sex offender checks on renters to prevent, in the words of one council member, “orgies in nice areas.”

Since then, the city of Sedona has also offered those landlords who can be persuaded to rent their homes to a local are offered a $10,000 subsidy. But few who work the low-wage tourism jobs can afford to live in Sedona. Neither can young families, which is why there is only a single elementary school, with declining enrollment, in a town of over 11,000 people. “Basically, people feel they live in a gas station,” observed resident Sean Dedalus.

The hard irony of the current controversy is that Sedona has long been defined by visitors and other outsiders. Sedona occupies a valley that had been a home for the Yavapai-Apache people for seven centuries before the U.S. Cavalry chased them away in the 1870s as a side campaign to the Apache Wars. When early settler J.J. Thompson arrived in Oak Creek Canyon, he found irrigation and fruit orchards that had been tended by people who packed up and left in a hurry. He simply took them over for himself, joined by later neighbors Manuel Chavez and the dapper storekeeper T. Carl Schnebly, who named the post office for his wife, Sedona.

The name Sedona gained cultural currency in the golden age of the pulp Western, after Zane Gray set his 1922 novel The Call of the Canyon in nearby Oak Creek Canyon, inspiring a quickie silent movie. Hollywood soon found the wine-colored spires and juniper trees just as rawbone-pretty as Monument Valley, not to mention closer to California. John Wayne came to Sedona to film Angel and the Badman, leaving behind a movie set that became a subdivision where all the streets were named after famous oat operas: Broken Arrow, Copper Canyon, The Last Wagon, Shotgun, and Johnny Guitar. Elvis Presley came here, too, to shoot what is widely regarded as the worst movie he starred in: 1968’s Stay Away, Joe, about a lascivious Native American named Joe Lightcloud who returns to the reservation in a Cadillac and rides a bull at the rodeo to redeem himself from bad behavior.

In the late 1950s, Sedona really found its tourism sweet spot. A real estate agent named Mary Lou Keller founded the Church of Light in her office and proclaimed the working-class ranching town a global center of spiritual energy. She may have been making this up to attract homebuyers who favored crystals and tarot cards, but the seekers arrived in force, turning Sedona into a cauldron of the New Thought movement that had gripped Los Angeles in the 1920s. One of Keller’s most important gurus was Manly Palmer Hall, who preached at L.A.’s occult Church of the People.

This influx of what conservative locals called “moon puppies” and “foo-foo woo woos,” led to Sedona’s first tourism crisis. Lisa Schnebly Heidinger, a great-granddaughter of Sedona Schnebly, recalled the day in the late 1960s when her grandfather came home for dinner to announce that a “bunch of hippies in their love van” had shown up at the Union 76 service station for repairs. He had gruffly sent them over to nearby Cottonwood, not knowing he was hustling away a future cornerstone of the local economy.

Today an estimated two hundred small businesses in Sedona cater to visitors intrigued with the theology of earth energy: bookstores, crystal emporiums, sweat lodge retreats, and other enterprises that come and go like sunbeams. One chamber of commerce survey found that 37% of visitors come for some kind of spiritual experience.

Often, they visit spots in the surrounding National Forests that have been proclaimed as “vortexes” of energy. Forest Service employees are constantly breaking up unauthorized rock arrangements that the metaphysical pilgrims say are “medicine wheels.” And in 2009, an Anglo businessman and “spiritual warrior” named James Arthur Ray held a sweat lodge ceremony that led to three deaths from the excessive heat. He served two years in prison for negligent homicide, and Native critics derided him as a “plastic shaman.”

Whatever their motivation, people keep catching what local realtors call “the red rock fever” and keep coming to Sedona—and adding to the traffic that kicked off the tourism debate in the first place. During the boom years of the 1970s and 1980s, spiritual flaneurs and second home seekers from Phoenix and Los Angeles flooded into the new subdivisions blossoming off the two main highways. A lack of coherent planning meant that interconnecting roads were never created and the legacy is a persistent traffic problem on Highway 89A, whose main junction, “The Y,” is often despairingly referred to as the “negative vortex.”

Recently, off-highway vehicles—most piloted by tourists—have added to the mess on 89A. Sedona mayor Scott Jablow, a former police officer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, sought to ban these dune buggies from paved highways, but the idea couldn’t withstand the opposition of rental companies serving out-of-towners hungry for desert adventures or Republican state legislators calling for small government.

Jablow himself fought off a 2022 electoral challenge from Samaire Armstrong, an actor on The O.C. turned anti-masking Republican who had called Black Lives Matter “a one-billion-dollar domestic terrorist organization.” Sedona’s liberals breathed a sigh of relief when the ex-cop won. It helped that Jablow wanted to slow down the town’s popularity. “We have too many tourists. Period,” he said before his election.

His victory seemed less of a commentary on the national culture wars and some on something closer to home: a desire to yank back the welcome mat to the middle-class in Arizona’s capital of luxury tourism. For those who commute here by private jet, this might seem an easy decision. But for those whose monthly income depends on a steady flow of visitors to buy ice cream, tarot cards, and sunscreen, the town’s identity—and price of admission—is at stake. Nature’s artwork is not supposed to have a price tag, but commodifying the rocks is an old Sedona custom. What we’re seeing is no revolutionary moment, but merely a haggle over the amount charged.

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The first time I met someone from Tucson, Arizona, I asked him a burning—pardon the pun—question. How did people there tolerate the summer heat? I pictured my childhood summers in Denver: hours-long games of “ghost in the graveyard” with my cousins, backyard badminton, and Frisbee at the neighborhood park. None of that would be fun in triple digits. He replied that it was easy: You just stay indoors. “It’s like winter in other places—a season where you can’t do anything,” he said.

In an unexpected twist, I now live in Tucson, which, along with much of the Sunbelt, has seen record-breaking, triple-digit days this summer. The media coverage of this extreme heat has, rightly, focused on those who are most vulnerable to high temperatures’ impacts: unhoused individuals, seniors, those with chronic illnesses, and in under-resourced neighborhoods, and the 20% of Arizonans who work outdoors. In Europe, where the temperatures are unprecedented, new research has raised concerns about how the absence of widespread air conditioning makes Europe unprepared for increasing heat.

But in the Sunbelt, most people have A/C. According to the Energy Information Administration, 94% of Arizona households use air conditioning, along with 95% of Texans and 96% of Floridians. That doesn’t mean that those of us who are healthy, housed, and work indoors are spared any need for heat-related concerns. But it does mean that the recommendation for tolerating the extreme heat is simple: Stay indoors.

The effect of this is that the experience of extreme heat isn’t dominated by danger, stress, or even grief, but something simpler and more surprising: Extreme heat is boring.

Discovering this made me think a little harder about what my Tucsonan acquaintance had said. Arizona summer wasn’t like winter—because winter wasn’t boring. Colorado not only had winters, but had built a massive economy around the season’s sports. Winter was full of activity. My brother and I took a “ski bus” to the mountains six Sundays each year. When local news announced a snow day, we went sledding and built forts. Once, when an unusually thick layer of snow had collected, my P.E. teacher led us into a forgotten basement room that held dozens of pairs of aging cross-country skis and boots, which we fitted to ourselves haphazardly. We spent class gleefully gliding around the school’s soccer field.

In contrast, one July weekend in Tucson, my partner and I collapsed into our couch after breakfast and couldn’t think of anything to do. Habituated to reading in bed in the early mornings, we missed the short, slightly cooler window of time that our neighbors used for walks. We liked to swim, but over the course of May and June, the nearby high-school pool had warmed to a temperature so hot it felt dicey to swim laps there. We considered driving somewhere, but I felt guilty about releasing more fossil fuels into the suffocating atmosphere simply so I could find marginally cooler temperatures. So we sat there, groaning, our sweaty thighs adhering themselves to the cushions.

At the time, I was reporting an article about heat in Tucson’s manufactured homes, many of which were built before federal standards for insulation were enacted. During my workdays, I was knocking on doors at run-down parks, asking people whether their home was too hot. But nearly everyone I spoke to had some form of air conditioning—even if operating it was a financial burden. Some of them mentioned that the biggest problem was blackouts, which affect manufactured homes disproportionately because entire parks are often connected to the electrical grid with a single hookup.

But while things were functioning, they, too, were bored. One woman told me that her family of three spent the summer in just one room, because they had only one window unit. Another mother and daughter invited me in for a glass of water. Their home was too temperate for an on-topic interview; they just wanted someone to chat with.

Evenings weren’t much better than weekends. The Tucsonans I had spoken to about the heat upon arriving in the city had assured me that things cooled down at night. In reality, the temperature rarely dropped below 86—the temperature at which I kept my own aging air conditioner, heeding the dictum that home units can only reliably cool 20 degrees. That meant running the air conditioner all night, which we hadn’t expected. In other places I had lived, I had always enjoyed opening the windows to let in cool air at night. As we struggled to adjust to sleeping with the stale air and loud intermittent fan, I longed for the crisp summer evenings of my childhood, for sitting outside rubbing my bare arms and thinking I should go put on a sweater.

Later, Arizona Daily Star environment reporter Tony Davis told me that there used to be a more reliable nighttime cool-down in Tucson, but it’s long since been a casualty of the urban heat island effect. Though high daytime temperatures get the most media buzz, it’s warmer nights that are accounting for the greatest warming trends across the Western U.S. Tragically, the loss of cooler nights is also killing saguaros.

I knew that hot nights made me sad. I quickly learned that they were also boring. During weekdays, my computer kept me busy, accompanied by ungodly amounts of flavored seltzer and occasional forays into the infernal backyard, just to feel something. But after work, I got cabin fever—or perhaps it should be more precisely termed “climate ennui.” I was too brain-dead to read. I ran out of shows to watch on Netflix. I scrolled and scrolled until it really felt like my brain was empty. I started going to the grocery store multiple times a week, to have a diversion that wasn’t sedentary.

Hardier desert-dwellers than I will roll their eyes at my lack of stamina and creativity, pointing to the hikes at dawn, the nighttime bike rides, the self-congratulatory pleasures of simply sweating it out. But what we’re living in now is no longer the old desert heat they know and have loved. As each successive heat dome drags on longer than the last, I suspect that even the most committed desert rats will have no choice but to spend more and more time indoors.

Ennui is famously an affliction of the privileged. But those of us who are privileged enough to suffer from climate ennui—for whom extreme heat is not life-threatening—are numerous. We are a class that could be mobilized, lashing out against our boredom. Where anger, grief, and reminders of our “grim reality” have failed to effect widespread climate activism, perhaps pushing back against boredom could do it for us.

In demanding a world where we’re not trapped indoors, twiddling our thumbs in front of vents of cool air, we would also be demanding a world with the housing and health care justice necessary to address the already-present and already-worsening effects of heat. Instead of thinking of our retreat into air-conditioned homes as a means of turning away from the reality of climate change, we should lean into the boredom it creates—in order to reject it.

The post Extreme Heat Is Boring appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kari Lake isn’t giving up. Even as she prepares to mount a campaign for U.S. senator, and more than two months after her election opponent was sworn in as Arizona’s governor, she swears that it is she who is the real governor of the state. She continues to insist the election was stolen.

Election denial has become one of the pillars of the modern GOP—but the desert soil of Arizona soaks up such hallucinatory claims like rain, at least partly because of the state’s unique history. Through most of the last century and a half, Arizona has been a geography of personal reinvention, ambitious schemes, and glowing hype that exceeded nature’s limits. The name itself is derived from a 1736 silver rush in a valley near a ranch called Arizona that flamed out just weeks after it began. Lake’s false crusade has already lasted longer.

What’s in the water in Arizona that inspires such obvious flimflammery?

Well, for starters, what water? A make-believe approach toward hydrology has characterized Arizona’s modern development. A state with an average annual rainfall of just 12 inches grows tens of thousands of acres of high-moisture cotton and supports more than 370 golf courses, in addition to 2.7 million households. Its allotment from the Colorado River was based on wildly optimistic flow projections, a century ago; by the 1960s, the state had to build a 330-mile canal to push H₂O uphill, away from its great rival, California. A lengthy drought and falling levels in Lake Powell, the country’s second-biggest reservoir, are now throwing future real estate ventures and population growth into doubt.

Fecklessness with limited water is practically written into Arizona’s DNA. In 1912, federal money put what was then the world’s biggest dam on the Salt River, and the farmer-aristocrats in the new state legislature thought so much of it they put its image on the official state seal. But their exuberance over the new Eden in the Desert—they thought the land hid mammoth springs beneath its surface—was overblown. “Underground waters were believed to be virtually inexhaustible,” said a 1949 Bureau of Reclamation report, published after most of Arizona’s surface water had been exhausted. “People held firm to the concept of vast underground rivers pouring endlessly to the sea and proceeded to develop more land.”

Land didn’t even need to be improved much to be a hot commodity in the state’s thunderdome of wishful thinking. During the 1960s, shady real estate brokers treated Arizona like a dry Florida with cactus, with homesites of worthless scrub sold to buyers through the mail via glitzy magazine advertisements, sight unseen. Dupes were horrified when they showed up in person to see barren lots, in the middle of nowhere, without utilities.

Big land hustles like Golden Valley, Prescott Valley, and Rio Rico—stretches of wasteland that a previous generation of cowpunchers had valued at just pennies on the acre—gave the state a dirty reputation nationwide. But gullible buyers always played a key role in settling Arizona, and these were only the latest incarnations of swindles of prior eras. The most famous early scoundrel, James Reavis, “The Baron of Arizona,” managed in the 1880s to convince hundreds of landowners between Phoenix and Silver City, New Mexico, to pay him quitclaim fees. He told them he was heir to a massive 18th-century grant from Charles III of Spain. Never mind that the grant was written on paper bearing the watermark of a Wisconsin mill. Reavis made a fortune.

Promoters touted dozens of flea-bitten mining settlements as the next Chicago or Pittsburgh in the frosted words of late-19th-century town boosters. John Clum, the founding editor of the state’s oldest continuously published newspaper, the Tombstone Epitaph, published the first issues of his paper from under a canvas tent. But that didn’t stop him from proclaiming the gang-infested silver town “a city set upon a hill, promising to vie with ancient Rome, in a fame different in character but no less in importance.”

Perhaps the paradigmatic novel of this state of highflying dreams and bitter realities is The Circus of Dr. Lao, published in 1935 by an Arizona Daily Star copyeditor named Charles G. Finney. The title character is a huckster who rolls into the fictional Arizona town of Abalone with cages full of mythical creatures like satyrs and sea serpents. Some townspeople think the beasts are ordinary livestock dressed up in ridiculous costumes. But are they?

Arizonans see what they choose to see. Before he went to federal prison in 1992, savings and loan king Charles Keating built a gilded luxury resort here called The Phoenician, off the filched earnings of thousands of widows. During the 1964 presidential race, revered U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona suggested he would defoliate the tree cover over the Ho Chi Minh Trail with nuclear weapons—and for good measure, he would “lob one into the men’s room at the Kremlin,” too. It cost him the nationwide nomination, but people back home loved it.

A lack of rootedness doesn’t help. Nearly 60 percent of today’s Arizona residents weren’t born here. The real estate economy functions like a Ponzi scheme in that sense, requiring a constant stream of buyers from elsewhere to justify the endless expansion of stucco roofs to the desert horizons. This is still the fastest-growing state in the West, with a 1.3% population uptick since 2021.

Part of the Arizona Dream is that you can move here with no family connections and no history and fit right in—even get elected to high office. People migrate here for a second chance and a fresh start in the land of wide-open skies and new opportunities. Without question, those exist, as do the knowledge, pragmatism, natural beauty, and neighborly character that give Arizona enduring appeal. But charlatans still hide in the sunshine. Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics surveyed reporters in 2014; they named Arizona the most corrupt state in the country.

Kari Lake—a native of Iowa who moved here for a job as a TV anchor—demonstrates a grasp of an enduring aspect of the state’s pie-in-the-sky identity with all her proclamations of buried treasure lying somewhere in those ballots. There are those who see hope in the state’s recent leftward tilt, via electing a Democratic governor, throwing its electoral votes to Joe Biden, and shifting the political gravity away from cosplay clowns like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who thought he could clean up Phoenix by dressing jail inmates in pink underwear and making them live in canvas tents in the desert. But Sen. Kyrsten Sinema changed her registration from Democratic to independent, setting up a potentially chaotic three-way Senate race in 2024, and the legislature remains in the hands of those who yelled “election fraud” loud enough to conduct an expensive recount that took months and showed nothing. They remain unrepentant, and their donors keep writing checks. Perhaps those who wish for a straightforward fade from red to blue are also chasing rainbows.

The post Kari Lake Is Just the Latest Arizona Hustler appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m a freelance writer who lives in the historically Black and Brown community of South Phoenix. After a long day covering the inequities of over-policing Black communities and the overuse of force against Black people, I watch the sun finally set on the desert horizon facing my office window. I cannot make out the houses on South Mountain because a lethal industrial and waste facility and highway pollution have erased them from view.

Suddenly the neighborhood app repeatedly beeps, alerting me to gunshots in the surrounding area. It’s a routine summer night here in the Wild West, where gangs, graffiti artists, sex workers, and thieves set the 100-plus-degree nights ablaze.

I hear the gunshots themselves, too, cracking as they penetrate the air. Red, white, and blue flashes illuminate the housing projects, two city blocks away. Sirens and ghetto birds are part of the city’s soundtrack. In the morning, news websites report the body counts from yesterday’s COVID-19 data, protests, police violence, and overnight street battles.

In Arizona, the stay-at-home executive order lasted only about three weeks until white conservatives decided that the Republican governor, Doug Ducey, had held them and their “right to work” hostage long enough. Their actions catapulted Arizona to one of the top five COVID-19 hot spots in the United States over the summer, alongside more populous states such as California, Florida, and Texas.

But even before Gov. Ducey signed the stay-at-home executive order, my wife and I decided to keep our daughters, who are Afro-Mexican—Jade, age 5, and Naimah, who will turn 2 in November—from the public. There was no evidence that children were less susceptible to contracting COVID-19, and we did not want to risk their health.

On the day the mayor of Phoenix made it mandatory to wear masks in June, I went to a gas station and witnessed two customers shouting at each other in a crowded shop:

Customer 1: “Why aren’t you wearing a mask?”
Customer 2: “Why are you walking the store with a backpack—going to steal something?”
Customer 1: “No, but they should check your pockets! Hey, yo, check her pockets!”
Customer 3: “He is so rude.”
Customer 2: “I know.”

The exchange confirmed my suspicion that there is no need to risk bringing my girls out where COVID-19 has exacerbated already existing tensions.

My anxiety and depression, which usually govern my daily life, have taken on new life in this COVID-19 hellscape.

As a husband and father, I feel helpless, unable to promise my wife and daughters safety from these dangers. As a service-connected disabled veteran with PTSD, it especially hard not to feel inundated with news and conversations about unarmed Black or Brown men, women, and children fatally shot by law enforcement.

Racial disparities mean that both COVID-19 and unemployment are disproportionately deadly to Black people, as are police-involved shootings.

One in 920 Black Americans have died of the virus, twice the rate of white Americans. Black folks also experience America’s highest unemployment rate, at 12.6 percent. And Arizona remains in the top five states for police-involved shootings; its rate of people shot by the police is 39 per million.

We live in South Phoenix’s 85041 zip code, a historically low- to middle-income community that remains a hotspot for COVID-19. Cases here are more than triple the per-capita cases in more affluent neighborhoods such as Scottsdale.

At 27th Ave & Southern Ave, where new homes are going to be built soon. Photograph by Maria Nancy Thomas

During the Segregation Era prior to the 1960s, the city of Phoenix designated South Phoenix as “hazardous land.” But today, the city government is selling this “hazardous land” to developers, along with significant tax breaks. Each new shopping complex and gated community built in our neighborhoods drives home values, rents, and property taxes higher. This rapid inflation is forcing families from the neighborhoods where they have lived in for generations.

On Sunday, April 19, 2020, I woke up to a report in the Detroit News about a 5-year-old girl named Skylar Herbert who developed a rare complication from coronavirus and became the first child from Michigan to die of the disease.

As I read the article, Jade’s face flashed through my mind. Then I thought of Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones.

Aiyana, a 7-year-old Black girl sleeping on her grandmother’s couch, was shot and killed by a Detroit SWAT team as the crew of an A&E true-crime reality TV show, The First 48, filmed. Police kicked in her grandmother’s apartment door, threw in a flash-bang grenade, and lit her blanket on fire. Then Officer Joseph Weekley fired a single shot that drilled through her head and out of her neck.

America has already added Skylar and Ayiana to its kill rate. Jade is in its crosshairs.

In the first week of July, we finally purchased a mask for Jade. Because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that children younger than 24 months not wear protective masks due to potential breathing issues, we have not had Naimah wear a mask, but we get mean side-eyes when people in public notice.

Jade holding her first mask. Photograph by Maria Nancy Thomas

We have talked to Jade about the pandemic, and she is very conscious of social distancing and the importance of wearing a mask in public. She also knows she won’t be able to go to school with her friends until the spread COVID-19 slows. Because I work from home, I am blessed to be able to care for my daughters during this time. My wife, Nancy, and I do not have to bear the added stress of finding daycare as many working parents do.

The girls’ smiles keep our spirits up amidst the ongoing social chaos.

Jade has adapted. Her friend, Z, lives next door, and lately his head appears above the 6-foot-high brick wall dividing his family’s back yard from ours. Both he and Jade have a ladder, and they take turns: Z sits on his ladder while Jade stands on the ground, or vice versa. It is their form of social distancing.

It is normal for my daughters and I stay inside our house to escape outside’s devilish heat, but this summer we added another step to our plan and constructed forts to protect ourselves from COVID-19. When Nancy returns home from her job as an operations manager at a fine arts installation company, the day is beginning to cool into the evening, and we can finally go outside. The Arizona sun and heat are harsh on our skin. Both my daughters have light brown skin. In less than ten minutes, they turn pinkish-red, even with sunscreen.

Lately, when I wake up, my heart swells, pushing against my chest. I wonder: “How can I avoid dying by the hands of the police or COVID-19?”

I am a member of one high-risk group because I live with genetic chronic hypertension and must avoid COVID-19’s potentially fatal symptoms. My body and mind fight each other. Mostly, I can’t sleep. Sometimes, I can’t eat. When I am able to eat, my internal organs are lethargic and the food moves too slowly. Every day, I feel uneasy.

I am scared to be a Black father who is genetically vulnerable to the novel coronavirus and socially vulnerable to the racism pandemic. My fear holds me hostage. But my fear is also a tool that keeps me vigilant. It feeds my physical and mental energy to fight for my daughters, for my family, and for my community’s right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

When friends and family ask me how I am, I answer, “My wife and daughters are healthy and happy. That is all that matters.”

The post A Letter From South Phoenix, Where Two Pandemics ‘Have Turned American Life Feral’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was blown away by the letters. They were at turns heartbreaking and hilarious. People want to do good, and you can see them wrestling with the idea that they’re trying to undo what they did. Additionally, there are stories upon stories of bad luck—from a plane crash near the park to car troubles, and even illness—all attributed to the pilfered stones.

But the ultimate irony is that the returned material can’t be put back in its original resting place. To do so would be to spoil those sites for research purposes, so they end up in the ‘conscience pile.’ The conscience pile is a kind of no man’s land—a space designed to be separate from the park, within the park. Rangers that I spoke with didn’t know when the pile was started and they have no plans for its future—so the rocks continue to pile up.

We spent a couple days handling the rocks and making photographs. We also made a temporary monument—a sculpture assembled using these stones—as a way of thinking of them not just as individual rocks but as a collection. You can find chunks of concrete, shards of sandstone, and pieces of coal slag among the petrified wood. The thing the conscience pile rocks have in common is that they’ve all been picked up and moved by people. It’s an interesting collection that has a lot of weight to it, literally and metaphorically.

Petrified wood itself is very magnetic; it’s beautiful, uncanny really, because it looks like wood, but it’s really heavy. I can see why, for a lot of people, it becomes this really enviable sort of thing to take home. After my second trip to the park, I wound up purchasing some random bits on eBay because I wanted to have some petrified wood to call my own. But it wasn’t ultimately satisfying in the same way. It didn’t fill that void of wanting to be connected with that specific place and time. So I can relate to people’s desire to want, to have, and to hold in their hands something that connects them to that landscape.

The stone that is photographed on a map came from my first visit. I was chatting with a ranger and a woman walked in. She was returning the item after having picked it up years ago, and she said something along the lines of, “Hey, I took this, and I just want the park to have it back.” It’s just this very small piece, probably two inches by one inch. I didn’t talk to her; I haven’t really had any contact with the people who have returned this wood and written these letters. I think there’s a little bit of shame wrapped around it. But I appreciated her returning the thing in person.

The funny thing about returning a rock is that it has to be done in person or through the mail. So you get these boxes that are completely tattered, because they’ve been flown around the world, or have been driven by truck across the country, and you get these handwritten, hand-typed, or printed-out letters. You can’t just fire up an email or make a social media post about it, so it has a more intimate appeal. And it becomes kind of confessional in that way.

I photographed the rocks on a white background. I really just wanted to see them set apart from their context as a way of appreciating their beauty and the intricacy. These things are really, really beautiful to behold, so the photos are kind of a way of recalling that experience of wanting to pick one of them up and own it. In many of the photographs, scale is intentionally left to the imagination. It’s hard to tell how big these rocks are—some are a couple feet across while others may be the size of a pea. I like leaving it to the viewer to fill in some of those details.

We tried to get a sort of random sampling, pulling out pieces of gorgeous petrified wood that felt that they could have come from the park and other scruffy bits that likely didn’t—a kind of overview of what the actual material looks like when you’re standing there at the pile. Who knows why they were picked? Someone was attracted to the one that looked like little pink salt crystals, someone else was attracted to the one that looked like a tree branch, someone else was attracted to the one they had to put in the trunk of their car because it weighed 60 or 80 pounds.

I love that they’re all so different. Everyone has a different idea of what would make a good souvenir.

I don’t know how many letter writers acknowledged it at the time but to me they’re sort of saying: Wait, this wasn’t mine to disturb, to have, or to own. That is a really powerful realization. Hopefully it leads to a larger dialogue on sustainability and how we can be better citizens of global ecological systems. I can’t help but think that people are engaging those questions when they think about this one little rock they picked up.

The post Are You Cursed If You Steal Rocks From the Petrified Forest? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Salinas, California and Yuma, Arizona are quite far apart—485 miles by plane and 600 by car.

But no two cities in the West are closer.

Salinas and Yuma are bound by two unstoppable California forces: salad and consumer expectation. We expect to have fresh salads on our tables year-round. In October, an arduous process makes that possible by linking the two cities. It goes by a deceptively simple name: Transition.

Transition happens twice a year. In the fall, major lettuce and vegetable growers and processors in Salinas literally pack up and move their entire operations—workers, supervisors, and multimillion-dollar processing facilities—to Yuma. In early spring, they reverse the process, returning from Yuma back to Salinas.

The reasons are climatic. Salinas may have California’s best weather in the spring and summer, but, as native son John Steinbeck once noted, “the high gray-flannel fog of winter” can “close off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world.” Yuma, meanwhile, claims to be the sunniest populated place in the United States. So, to assure its official status as “Salad Bowl of the World,” Salinas requires four months of assistance each year from Yuma, the “Winter Fresh Vegetable Capital of the United States.”

But Transition has costs. These start with the logistical challenges of rapidly relocating not just crops but also the increasingly sophisticated technology used in processing what is grown for pre-packaged salads and pre-cut fresh vegetables. The farm operations that make the Transition typically shift a crop’s production in three days—usually over a weekend.

As sales of specialty products like bok choy and heirloom spinach have grown, so has the scale of Transition. During these fall weeks, people in Salinas and Yuma will see hundreds of trucks and pieces of agricultural equipment, sometimes blocking streets as companies pack and unpack. If you spot massive convoys of trucks on highways on an October weekend—one grower required 125 trucks last year—you may be seeing Transition in action.

“If you’re not part of Transition, it sounds ridiculous: ‘You mean, we’re going to tear down our $80 million operation and move it to Yuma and put it back together in three days?’” says Clint Cowden, an industry veteran who is dean of career technical education and workforce development at Hartnell College in Salinas. “But if you are part of it, it’s normal.”

The Salinas-Yuma Transition is the product of consolidation; California once had multiple lettuce districts, but they’ve been gobbled up by other crops and housing development. One of the last remaining such districts, in Huron in western Fresno County, is still a brief side-trip for some Salinas growers, who stop for a couple weeks of harvest on their way to Yuma.

That Arizona city is a natural and longtime California partner. Set at a narrow part of the Colorado River just across from California, Yuma was a major entry point for migrants to California, from the Gold Rush to the Dust Bowl. The area has been an agricultural marvel since the 1912 completion of the Yuma Siphon, a massive irrigation tunnel under the Colorado River.

Today, Salinas, a city of 157,000 in Monterey County, and Yuma, a city of 95,000 in a desert valley of 200,000, jointly support a $3.8 billion piece of the agricultural industry, and so the stakes of Transition are higher.

Climate change has made weather less predictable in both places, so some growers use fields in Mexico as a weather hedge. (Yuma has had unexpected bouts of winter frost and early spring heat that can damage lettuce.)

Transition also has emerged as a suspect in some cases of food contamination; a commission investigating the E. coli found in romaine lettuce from Yuma last season has questioned why such cases appear more likely to happen late in seasons, often right around the time of Transition.

But the biggest costs of Transition lie in the adjustments both cities make as a big piece of their economy departs and returns every year.

Right now, Salinas people can look forward to the lighter traffic of winter. “It becomes a lot easier to make a left turn on Abbott Street,” says former Mayor Dennis Donohue. The city’s airport, though, gets busier, as Salinas-based growers use small planes to commute to Yuma during the week. Salinas teachers say that some students struggle in the winter when farmworker parents head off to Yuma, leaving them with other relatives.

Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls says his residents have become accustomed to streets that brim with agricultural equipment at this time of year. In addition to the 40,000 people who show up for farm work in winter, Yuma gets another 100,000 visitors to its charming downtown and recreational opportunities, especially along the riverfront. The city’s main challenge is accommodating this seasonal population growth. Nicholls notes that the reconstruction of an Interstate 8 interchange in Yuma has been paused for six months so that it doesn’t slow down agriculture-related traffic.

After decades of Transition, Yuma is becoming less of a little brother in the Salinas relationship. Yuma’s growing season has gotten a little longer, and companies are expanding facilities for storage and processing. Yuma also has become more appealing to workers than Salinas, largely because of California’s housing mess. Traditionally, workers built their lives in Salinas, but some now prefer to make their main residence in Yuma or the neighboring cities of San Luis or Somerton, which produce plentiful and affordable starter homes.

In comparison, Salinas housing is miserably expensive, with workers squeezing into shared apartments or living in trailers or cars. (One-third of students in the Salinas City Elementary School District are considered homeless because they have no postal address.) In response, some Salinas growers, finding it harder to recruit and retain workers to California, have launched major projects to build worker housing, modeled on a $17 million complex in Spreckels, next door to Salinas, that was opened by vegetable grower Tanimura & Antle in 2016.

Salinas and Yuma are actually similar in profile. Both are poorer cities in beautiful settings, with young, majority-Latino populations. But for all the ways that salad shrinks geography and blurs the lines between California and Arizona, there have been few formal collaborations between Salinas and Yuma outside of agriculture and workforce.

Mayor Nicholls and other civic leaders in both places say cultural and educational exchanges would make sense. But when is there time? Both cities are consumed with the never-ending task of meeting the demand for fresh food—and of providing for those who work so we might eat.

The post Salinas and Yuma Are 500 Miles Apart—But Agribusiness Is Growing Them Closer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I certainly have stories of my family’s past, shaped by witches, warfare, and the Wild West. But with every generation, an ancestral tradition has been shed, a cultural touchstone tweaked, through choice or force, until I arrived at the no man’s land where I live today.

What I do know comes from stories, or pieces of stories—fragments, gathered over time—but they were never quite full. Some were overheard at weekly family dinners at my grandma’s house in midtown Tucson. I saw others in a Facebook group for “The Windes Family of Arizona,” set up to share family history. But none of these fragments cohered in a way that felt meaningful to the way I live my life, and the way I identify myself as a person.

One of my earliest realizations about my ancestry was learning that my mother’s father was an Indian. I didn’t know much about what that meant, and I would later find out that neither did my mother, who grew up thinking her father was Cherokee, only to find out later in life—through a slip of the tongue—that he was a Sioux.

The profound cultural differences between Cherokee and Sioux weren’t something I knew growing up. But upon reflection, it isn’t so simple. Some of my ancestral amnesia may derive from the fact that my grandfather grew up as a Native American orphan in the 1920s.

Another family myth that stuck with me through the years is that I am a descendant of the first witch burned in the United States—a story that I heard from some relatives on my mother’s side, but later found out was a bit exaggerated—or maybe I just misremembered it.

My ancestor, Mary Dyer, was a Quaker who was hanged after Bostonians discovered that she had given birth to a malformed child and then disposed of it secretly (a crime her strictly Puritan neighbors blamed on her Quaker beliefs). Hiding the corpse of the child, who was born with microcephaly, was the last in a long line of “offenses” that had Dyer banished from the Puritan colony multiple times before her eventual demise. Some say her death was the catalyst that led to the Rhode Island Charter, one of the earliest declarations of religious freedom in America.

But as a child growing up in a suburb of Tucson I told this story to anyone on the playground who would listen—relishing the effect it had—and embellishing some of the grisly details, including the addition of green-tinged skin and a pointy hat. Later, in high school, I wrote essays about my mysterious kinswoman, but I never identified with Mary. Not any more than I did with the Sioux or Cherokee Indians. They were characters in a history textbook that I knew as the past—not my past, just the past.

Dyer was not the only one of my ancestors with a strong religious connection. In 1879, Romulus Adolphus Windes became the first Windes relative to roll into Arizona, with his wife and two children, pulled by his two donkeys, Tom and Jerry. He was the first Baptist minister in the state, and he went on to found the first Baptist church in Prescott, and moved on to found churches in Globe, Cottonwood, and Jerome, and 10 Sunday schools in the Verde Valley, south of Sedona.

I learned the story of Adolphus from a speech given to the Tempe historical society by my great-grandfather, and more from a thesis written by a graduate student at the University of Arizona.

All these stories became part of the background noise that I tuned out. My ancestors’ religion, like their ethnicity, didn’t factor in my family’s sense of itself. I was raised as an atheist, viewing religion as the antithesis of science and education, which were revered in my household.

And so the old stories and my lack of religion blurred together. My family is not attached to the past or bound to the fear or calling of an afterlife. Instead, we try to make ourselves fully present through education, hard work, and intention.

Growing up, I viewed myself as a part of many communities at the same time, without ascribing to any single one. My best friend in second grade was a Romanian. Later, I met Anthony, a Mexican American whose family had many traditions and a heritage that I didn’t view as strange or foreign. His grandmother made tamales, and his family held get-togethers that included me—and that I loved. It was also through his family that I first came to appreciate the one, new American holiday that I celebrate: Super Bowl Sunday.

Some of the stories of my family’s past are not fantastic adventures. Rumors of infidelity, divorce, family drama, and money troubles plague my family tree. These blights on my ancestry blend in with the rest. There are multiple stories—or at least rumors—of male ancestors of mine who abandoned their families and changed their names. I sometimes feel ashamed of these people, and feel a small sense of curiosity—but no burning desire to investigate.

Some stories were purposely redacted from the pages of my family’s collective history. When I was in my 20s and asked around a bit, relatives told me about “skeletons in the closet” that the Windes were not proud of. Affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, the Confederacy, and slavery were just a few examples, but I never heard a whisper of these skeletons growing up.

Much of my ignorance growing up was due to a lack of due diligence, and a short attention span. A second cousin on my dad’s side, and many relatives on my mother’s side, know a lot about my ancestry. But I was taught by my parents that this didn’t affect who we were, or who I am, because we are who we make ourselves out to be.

The most tangible connection I have to my distant ancestors is that they walked in the same halls where I now go to school. In memoirs written by some of the Windes family, stories of running the halls of the Tempe Normal School, now Arizona State University, give me a tinge of excitement—of connection—that where they stood, I now stand. Where they taught and learned, I now learn. I am making myself where they made themselves, long ago. I guess that means I’m an Arizonan-American.

The post What Kind of an American Am I? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My daughter sang
all through both hours of the drive.
She played her favorite songs
and belted out the belty ones,
and as we neared the city,
the sun showed us which pocket
of the sky it had been tucked
inside: it said, Light starts here,
the deep southeast, the idea
of Mexico. In G.

She sang. The one about the farmhouse
and the girlfriend who broke it off too soon,
the one about the anorectic
whose father was an asshole,
and one about a founding father
cheating on his wife.

She’s made of both the lyrics and the chords,
who is she? Where are her friends?
She holds music in her
throat the way my friend Martina laughs,
the love of laughter flooding in
along with thought, the observation
and the joy of making it
equally potent, and here in the car,
the joy of just how sad the song knows
she is sometimes, often actually.

The post Pop Goes the World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I didn’t know that when I was 11 years old, and my world was rocked by a series of events. My parents got divorced. My mom decided to get remarried. And to accommodate my soon-to-be stepdad and his stable, pre-Great Recession job, my mom, my two younger sisters, and I left my hometown of Chicago and moved to Phoenix, Arizona.

Those two places are more than 1,700 miles apart. But I would discover that at this moment in U.S. history, two big American cities, both full of lots of people from someplace else, can feel like neighbors—no matter the distance between them. And so, nine years after arriving in Phoenix, I still identify as a Chicagoan. It’s not just because that’s where I was born—it’s because Phoenix has reinforced that identity.

I arrived, of course, kicking and screaming. Before I moved here, my preconceived notions of Phoenix were similar to what I had seen in old Western movies that I watched with my grandfather—a barren wasteland of desert, filled with nothing more than tumbleweeds blowing in the hot wind and shootouts between John Wayne-esque cowboys. I can still feel the uncomfortably hot breeze on my face as I stepped off the plane in July of 2007. (For the lucky ones who are unfamiliar, a Phoenix breeze in July feels like the strong whisper of a hot breath in your ear—only one that encompasses your entire body.) It was nearly exactly how I had pictured it, only instead of cowboys there were middle-class, white Americans who felt the need to open-carry into the local Walmart. Because, Arizona.

At first, I didn’t care much for the desert urban reality. I hated it. I despised it. I loathed it. Phoenix is a difficult city to relate to. “How can you relate to a city?,” I know you’re thinking. Take one stroll through Chicago and you’ll understand. The city is full of life, echoing with the sounds of street performers and rumbling under the rush of the Loop train. Chicago is one of the biggest cities in the nation, but everyone seems to know one another. It’s a major city that feels like a small town.

I missed it. But the more time I spent in Phoenix, the more I realized that Chicago’s roots extended well outside the Windy City. Phoenix was—and is—rich in expats like myself. Many people moved here from someplace else, so all kinds of midwestern transplants like me were looking for new friends and communities where they belonged. I was especially lucky that many Phoenicians are originally from Chicago, and came here to escape the cold, find more affordable living, or find work.

My family and I slowly connected with other Chicagoans, both in person and online. Some of our neighbors turned out to be from Chicago as well, creating a familiar feel within our neighborhood. My family joined Facebook forums focused on uniting Chicagoans in Phoenix and we used the sports cultures to keep connected. We watched or attended Chicago Cubs vs. Arizona Diamondbacks games, Chicago Bears vs. Arizona Cardinals games, and, ahem, Stanley Cup Champions Chicago Blackhawks vs. Arizona Coyotes games.

After I began my freshman year at Arizona State University, the connection between the city that I loved and the city that I was thrust into only grew stronger. I ran into more and more students or faculty who were from Chicago, coming for the academics (or the parties) and bringing their Windy City pride with them. I was no longer a lone outsider struggling to find an identity in this new home. My identity as a Phoenix resident was molded by my love and pride for my old home, one that I could share with other, like-minded Chicagoans around me.

Throughout the nine years I’ve lived in the Valley, I watched the Windy City get blown across state lines. The market of Chicago-themed sports bars boomed. The Chicago Cubs established a brand-new spring training stadium in Mesa. Often, more Chicago sports fans showed up to Arizona games than home team fans. Wearing your team’s jersey or gear would inevitably get you a, “Hey, go Cubs!” or “Da Bears!” as you walked down the street. Classic Chicago food joints such as Portillo’s began popping up all over the place. Chicago wasn’t just housed within the confines of Chicago anymore. Slowly but surely, Chicago subsumed itself into Phoenix, giving the city an entirely new identity.

While Phoenix still isn’t, and never could be, as beloved to me as Chicago, I’ve grown to accept and rejoice in the merging of my two cities. I can take a shuttle to Sloan Park and sing along to “Go, Cubs, Go” as the Cubs take on the Los Angeles Angels. I can go down to Lou Malnati’s and grab a classic, deep-dish pizza. I can impress my friends and total strangers with an occasional slip into my accent. I can fend off jokes about being too cold in 60-degree weather.

You can take the girl out of Chicago, but you can never take Chicago out of the girl—thanks to the welcoming arms of a Sun Belt city like Phoenix.

The post What Happens When Windy City Culture Mingles with the Sun Belt’s Hot Breeze? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.