Busted While Latina

I guess I won’t be visiting Arizona again anytime soon.

It’s sad, because Arizona is such a lovely place that you almost forget some of its messier history, like all that unpleasantness around the observance of the Martin Luther King holiday back in the 1980s and 1990s. Or that once upon a time, say about a year and a half ago, its senior Senator-turned-presidential candidate (who had also voiced strong opinions about the King holiday) selected a running mate so ill-equipped that on Election Day voters responded with a resounding chorus of, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

On a personal level, Arizona evokes a certain wistful nostalgia. To paraphrase The New York Times’ theater critic Ben Brantley, I lost it in Arizona. Not the big “It,” mind you, but an “it” that was no less a first.

Driving through Phoenix on my first visit to the state in 1991, en route to a church where a retired gentleman waited patiently to be interviewed for a now-defunct denominational magazine, I became so engrossed in singing along with the radio that it was only after pulling into the church parking lot that I became aware of the flashing lights and sirens that apparently had been following me for some distance – an adventure that resulted in my first, and to date, only, speeding ticket, for driving 72 mph in a residential zone. (The interviewee subsequently was considered too boring by said magazine’s managing editor and his story was never published; the moving traffic violation remained on my driving record, hiking up my auto insurance rates for the next 39 months.)

I’ve since gone back to Arizona several times – for meetings, conventions, sometimes with an extra day or two tacked on to the end of a business trip to enjoy the scenery.

But after last Friday, it’s unlikely I’ll be making a lot of voluntary trips there anymore.

SB1070, signed into law on April 23 by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and hailed in some circles as a necessary crackdown on illegal immigration, makes it a crime not to carry immigration documents, and gives the police broad latitude in detaining individuals suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.

I might get busted for being in Arizona while latina.

Now let me confess that in my natural distractibility, I’ve been known to lose important documents on a regular basis. Once, my passport went missing the same day I was to return to the U.S. and it was only by the grace of the U.S. Embassy that I was able to swear an affidavit and board a plane home just in time to be in the pulpit the next morning. (The passport, in case you were wondering, turned up a week or so later, neatly tucked into one of those little purse-sized bibles that zips all the way around.) And, it’s common knowledge among my colleagues that, at least once or twice a week, I manage to misplace the security I.D. card that lets us into the building where our offices are located.

So it’s not out of the question that I might saunter out on to the streets of Phoenix or Tempe or Tucson or Yuma one day, having absentmindedly left the necessary documents in a drawer or a suitcase – or maybe even in another bible. And what if, in the course of my stroll, I submit to a craving and stop at some Mom & Pop establishment and order up a serving of chicharrones? Will I fit the profile? Then what? Busted while latina!

Granted, as a cubana, I probably needn’t worry. After all, when I arrived from La Habana in 1957, my green card was already in my two-year old hand (or, more likely, in my mother’s). Existing “wet foot/dry foot” immigration policies favor cubanos even as they discriminate against other immigrant groups, so that once here, cubanos don’t have to be concerned with the threat of being sent “back to where we came from.”
 

“Where do you come from?”

It's a question I’ve heard all my life. And as the parents of a blended family of six meztizo young adults – three the biological children of una mamá cubana and a father with Scottish-Welsh roots and the other three born of an African American mother and a white father who traces his ancestry to the earliest English settlers in the Americas – Philip and I have witnessed similar “What are you?” reactions to our children. Two of our three matrilineally latino offspring are at times assumed to be white – my son Will’s kindergarten class roster listed a tentative “H?” under his race/ethnicity, until the teacher was assured it was okay to remove the question mark – while our three African American daughters, with skin the color of café con leche, are assumed to be latinas.

Every now and then, I regale them all with romanticized stories about the car trips we used to take from Manhattan to Miami when I was a little girl. Piled into the black 1957 Plymouth Belvedere my father had nicknamed Chucho, its sweeping tail fins slicing through the air, the windows rolled down all the way as our sweaty limbs stuck to the seats, we made our way down the East Coast. Because construction on I-95 was not yet completed, our southbound sojourns took us through small towns where “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards dotted the landscape and drinking fountains were still labeled “Whites Only.” It was in one of those towns that we pulled into a gas station late one day, needing to feed the gas-guzzling Chucho, only to see an attendant came out brandishing a shotgun, conveying more eloquently than words the unspoken message, “What are you? And what are you doing here?”

That memory has haunted me since the events in Arizona last week. Because when all the rhetoric about secure borders and job protection is stripped away, what’s left are the same ugly questions: “What are you? And what are you doing here?” Which means that no one – nadie – is safe. Not those who will be rounded up for fitting an arbitrary profile. Not my brown-eyed, brown-skinned offspring. Not me. Not you.

So, I won’t be singing along to Glen Campbell about the time I’ll get to Phoenix. I’ll pass for now on visiting the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley or Tombstone, and take a rain check on experiencing the existential high of standing in four states at once.

'cause if I’m gonna get busted in Arizona, at the very least I want to be singing at the top of my lungs and driving 72 mph when the flashing lights and sirens come after me.