We believe that the radical possibilities of total liberation from authority are far more transformative and intoxicating than any steps to a revolution as prescribed by any so-called revolutionary chairman. Take their stance on Arizona as an example, one of their demands “No more troops! Demilitarize the border!”, this is not only a conservative stance amongst revolutionaries, but it shows that once again the people are ahead of their revolutionary “leaders.” The RCP, like many on the left, are afraid to state the obvious, that millions of people have already disregarded the legitimacy of the border line, they have to move across it every day, regardless of the law. Further more, by solely opposing the militarization of the borderlands they join in a colonial tradition that attacks the indigenous people of these occupied lands, as tribes are indeed separated by the border wall. By holding the legitimacy of the state over those of the individuals and communities struggling to preserve their ways of life, the RCP become de facto ideological enforcers of the border.

— The “Revolution” we really, really DON’T Need…

So our history isn’t everything — it’s also what people bring with them. While we have a racist past to be sure, we likewise have the ongoing settler expansion, which continues to this day as an internal influx of people from other parts of the US. The population of Arizona has more than doubled in the last thirty years, thrusting Phoenix practically overnight from a backwater to the fifth largest city in the nation, and gobbling up land at a rate that quickly gave our city a geographical area larger than LA, bumping uncomfortably up against the two O’odham reservations that sit to the south and east of the Valley.
While many people in states outside Arizona bemoan the backward nature of Arizona politics, it’s important to note that given this flood of people from other parts of the US, Arizona’s politics are not really just “Arizona’s politics”. They are the politics of the rest of the country, magnified — smashed together in collapsing now but once overpriced suburbs and set on fire by long commutes to work in the company of hot-headed right wing radio jocks.
In Arizona, white people who have moved two thousand miles in just the last few years to set up their suburban homestead or to secure their cheap retirement denounce the movement of people who may have only traveled a few hundred miles, or who may have migrated back and forth for generations. Or, it’s true, who may have been deported during one of the previous economic crashes, dispossessed of their labor and their meager earnings and deposited across la linea when they became inconvenient to the demands of Capital, just like the Wobblies from Bisbee in an earlier era, the largest part of whom were Mexican.
Perhaps people who move here can be forgiven for not knowing the history of Arizona, but did they not at least look at a map before they piled their possessions in a U-Haul and headed West? That funny shaped thing to our South is Mexico! And Phoenix is in the “Sonoran Desert”, a name it shares with the Mexican state of Sonora that borders us. The Sonoran Desert also contains the O’odham pilgrimage site of Magdelena. The rising border fences and military deployments that so many new Arizonans request will impede or even make impossible this yearly voyage. Likewise the demands for papers cannot be met by many traditional people, born outside cities and unable to acquire documents acceptable to law enforcement and border authorities. Sometimes the obvious ain’t so obvious to everyone.
But, unfortunately, when these internal white American “immigrants” and migrant workers to Arizona (and what else do you call people who moved here for jobs at Taser International and Boeing that now find themselves foreclosed and dispossessed in the era of the new austerity?) left their crowded East Coast cities and turned West, their RV’s and East Coast and Midwest accents weren’t all they brought with them: they also brought their racist politics, which finds fertile grounds in the not-so-long-ago-stolen Arizona land.

— The fight continues: A reminder from the Phoenix Class War Council about the struggle in Arizona

I ask you, ‘What does reasonable suspicion mean?” Letona said through a megaphone. “It means not looking white. It means not sounding white. It means those who do not conform to a certain idea of what Americans should look like.

— Boston: Activists denounce Arizona immigration law [via]  

A tendency has emerged here in Phoenix that I find very exciting. More and more, as we resist the leftist model, so seductive to others, of building bigger and often disingenuous organizations (instead keeping our relations intimate and small scale), I have found that many of us have converged around a familiar and familial politics that is almost entirely unique in the US. With few exceptions (probably Modesto most notably), a particular strain of class war, race traitor, insurrectionist, and primitivist influenced politics has emerged here. Many anarchists in this town defy conventions, reject orthodoxy and instead take our influences based on what makes sense rather than whatever arbitrary groupings of ideas fall under what predetermined label.
Is it the hot summers? Is it the never-industrialized vastness of the ever-growing suburban wasteland? Phoenix seemed for so long to be like the universe — vast but always somehow getting fucking bigger. A constantly growing behemoth, ever eating up more desert. Is it the proximity to the border? Is it the fact that Arizona was a segregated state? Is it the fact that you can see the horizon from anywhere in town? Or that the sun sets so brilliantly every evening? Is it because Phoenix was built on blood, for white people and to the exclusion of the native peoples who continue to make this area their home? Is it the malls that provided the plastic playgrounds of our youths? Is it the fact that almost no one living here was born here? Is it the waves of conquest, migration, dispossession and expulsion that define our history? To be from Arizona and also older than ten is a rare thing here, even in this age of economic collapse and foreclosed homes.

— There’s no immigration law like no law at all: On revolution as the necessary conclusion of the migrant movement

The desperation is ever present in Maricopa County. Local activists devoted to challenging the racism oozing from the local state legislature and county sheriff are exhausted. The years of symbolic protest and moral appeals to the white citizen majority have failed. Even when Arpaio’s numbers slipped in the polls (he currently is seeing some of his highest poll numbers state wide), support for anti-immigrant ballot initiatives remained at 80%. Other activists and lawyers have sought the intervention of the federal government, and while the Department of Justice has sent a handful of observers to the county to little affect during their 20 month stay. The situation has only grown worse, more families are broken up by MCSO workplace raids, more immigrant workers have been deported, and even more have “self-deported,” fleeing the state that was their home.
Was it just four years ago that we saw the “huelga general,” a real general strike happened here in Maricopa County? In downtown Phoenix hundreds of thousands of workers marched and rallied for protection from the coming onslaught of anti-immigrant legislation and popular white hysteria that was reaching a fever pitch. Now we’re lucky to see a few thousand marching for immigrants and calling for the end of the era of racialized policing. The dwindling numbers are of no surprise to many of us, for years organizers have stonewalled and marginalized radical voices and tactics, preferring symbolic and moral appeals to power, especially as the demands of the movement are in retreat. Gone are the “somos America, we are America” slogans, now the signs read “We are human,” a plea to the white citizenry to recognize, at the very least, that immigrants are also human beings.

— Arizona: A State of Emergency

So, I say that whites have “mis-diagnosed” the problem because even though there is some truth to the general allegation that cheap immigrant labor does in some instances impact the wages of other “legal” labor, the movements that have emerged to defend the class position of whites has foundered, as has been the case historically, on the borders of whiteness. That is, rather than pointing their rage upwards at the capitalists, politicians and bureaucrats that set different segments of the working class against each other, the white movement has seen fit instead to defend its whiteness and the accompanying privileges. In a real sense, a civil war rages within the working class in Arizona.
As a result of their limited class imagination, whites in Arizona have demanded a massive expansion in the border policing apparatus in the hopes that it will protect their class position, which has become increasingly tenuous in the last decade. As a result of this, checkpoints set up by the border patrol have moved north of la linea and into what are perceived by their white residents as white communities far from the border (up to 100 miles north in some cases). This has caused friction between white residents and the border patrol and has caused the conditions for an emergence of an anti-checkpoint movement on the political right.

—

When the Border Is Everywhere: Examining the Resistance to Speed Cameras and Border Checkpoints in Arizona.

Yeah, loving Fires Never Extinguished. Can’t wait to get back to the border.

The road north from PHX to Flagstaff is open every day of the year. This is the best part about PHX.

— BrodieShadeTree commenting on Teach me about Phoenix.