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...desert, exploding a population of around 100,000 in the 1940s to its current estimated 4 million residents (C. Sargent 1988; U.S. Census Bureau 2005). Nostalgic reflections on the city's short history tend to accentuate this boomtown narrative and disproportionately focus on non-Hispanic achievements in conquering the arid desert environment. (1) This perception of early Phoenix as an almost entirely Anglo metropolis persists despite evidence of substantial Mexican roots in the city. For example, regardless of Phoenix's nascent Mexican population, early adobe architecture, proximity to Mexico, and historic southward connections, the pantheon of historic local luminaries is represented by figures from faraway Missouri, Michigan, and Connecticut. These personalities include John W. "Jack" Swilling, a Missourian associated with the founding of Phoenix; Dr. Alexander J. Chandler, a veterinarian from Michigan, who became a land speculator and canal developer; and Charles Trumbull Hayden, a Connecticut-born businessman who founded the flour mill around which the suburban city of Tempe emerged. Similarly, representations of contemporary Phoenix ignore its original Mexican heritage and instead promote images of verdant golf courses, azure swimming pools, and a pseudo-Mediterranean lifestyle that strive to clearly differentiate the metropolitan area from other quintessentially Mexican or Spanish southwestern cities such as Tucson, Arizona, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas.
In this writing we put aside the contrived notion of past and present Phoenix as a fundamentally Anglo place. Instead, we assert that the metropolitan area not only has Mexican roots and a resurgent Mexican population but also embodies long-standing regional connections that contribute to its distinctive Mexican subculture. We begin by illuminating the Mexican character of early Phoenix, an element of the city's history that was selectively diminished and drowned out by a crush of Anglo newcomers. We then focus on the revival of Mexican Phoenix, highlighting how this unprecedented population shift has transformed the urban landscape. Next, we incorporate both survey and landscape data to demonstrate that Phoenix's Mexican population is truly a regionally select subculture formed through both historical and contemporary connections with particular Mexican states. We end with a call for greater understanding of the internal diversity of the Mexican population in the United States and a reassessment of the monolithic Mexican national identity so commonly perpetuated in popular media.
A FORGOTTEN MEXICAN PAST
The history of Mexicans in the Southwest has been a selective telling, and only in very recent accounts has the story of their role been reinterpreted. In these reassessments it is clear that Mexican ancestry has been viewed largely as a romanticized past involving "myth" in New Mexico (Wilson 1997), "whitewashing" in Los Angeles (Deverell 2004), and a "Spanish colonial" culture in California (Kropp 2006).
In Arizona, Tucson's Mexican heritage has been recounted (Sheridan 1986), yet Phoenix's Mexican past has largely been forgotten. One critic called Phoenix "the most ahistorical community in the United States" and noted that "the citizens of Phoenix are in fact principally to blame for the lack of historical interest in their own community," not having formed a historical society and museum until the mid-1970s (Johnson 1993a, ix). One of the earliest modern histories of the city was an edited volume in which the two chapters about ethnic groups in the city's past highlighted Native Americans and Italians, neither of whom ever constituted a majority of the city's population (Johnson 1993b).
Conventional histories of Phoenix relate the often-told story of John W. "Jack" Swilling, a Missourian and ex-Confederate soldier, deserter, freighter, prospector, and speculator who arrived in the Salt River Valley in 1867 via earlier Arizona connections in Tucson, Prescott, and Wickenburg. Founder of the Swilling Irrigating and Canal Company, Swilling spearheaded the construction of the first modern canal system in the valley and founded the town site of Phoenix, thereby claiming the title of "Father of Phoenix" (Mawn 1977; Luckingham 1989). Typically absent from these histories is the fact that Swilling married Trinidad Escalante (1849-1925), a native of Hermosillo, Sonora, in Tucson in 1864. Before the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880, Tucson was Arizona's commercial hub. The old pueblo was still very much a Sonoran town despite its post-1853 Treaty of Mesilla (Gadsden Purchase) U.S. sovereign status. It was tied by overland freighters to the Sonoran port of Guaymas and to the port of Yuma, Arizona (Sheridan 1986, 39-40). Tucson was also supplied by trade routes that extended to Missouri via the Santa Fe Trail. Thus, the linking in Tucson of Trinidad Escalante from Sonora to Jack Swilling from Missouri would not have been an unexpected bond during this era along the southwestern frontier. Between 1850 and 1880 some 12 percent of marital unions in Tucson were Anglo men and Mexican women (Griswold del Castillo 1984, 68-69).
That Phoenix's ancestral heritage was bicultural from its earliest days, however, has not been the popular narrative history of the city. Nevertheless, it can certainly be argued that if Jack Swilling was the Father of Phoenix, then Trinidad Escalante, who raised seven children, was surely Phoenix's mother (Dean and Reynolds 2006, 11-12). Jack Swilling died while incarcerated in Yuma in 1878, but Trinidad Escalante Swilling remarried and died in Phoenix as Trinidad Swilling Shumaker in 1925.
The whitewashing of Phoenix's Mexican ancestry has been compounded by the selective memory about early Mexican populations in the city and their contributions to its rise. In 1870, the first federal census for the city counted 124 Mexicans, representing 53 percent of the total population. A decade later, 772 Mexicans were enumerated, but their proportion of the total population fell to 45 percent. By 1900, the Mexican total was 802 (others likely lived outside the city limits), then only 14 percent of the city total as railroad connections facilitated Anglo immigration that flooded Phoenix, the emerging center of the Salt River Valley (C. Sargent 1988; Dean and Reynolds 2006, 13). It was probably this era of Anglo demographic dominance that skewed the history of the city, creating the myth that Phoenix was always an Anglo town without Hispanic roots.
Not only were Mexicans significant as a majority population in early Phoenix, they were critical to the construction of the first cultural landscapes of the city. Their labor and expertise, according to the historian Bradford Luckingham (1994, 16-17), proved essential to the success of irrigation works and farming in the valley. Construction of acequias was chiefly the labor of Mexicans, and they typically served as ditch overseers to watered fields. Mexicans helped survey the Phoenix town site, cleared and maintained streets, built utility systems, raised crops and provided labor for many other services to the early city.
Certainly their most telling influence was the shaping of Phoenix's first townscape. Distant from sources of timber that were prohibitively expensive to transport to the city before the railroad arrived, Phoenix was a mud village in its first incarnation (Garrison 2007). Adobe construction was alien to most Anglos but a long-standing tradition in northern Mexico and throughout the Hispanic Southwest (West 1974). In the early 1870s Phoenix was described as "a neat little town, constructed principally of adobe," yet Anglos derisively called the architecture "Greasian" or "Sonoran" (Mawn 1979, 51-53). Conventional reports say little about who constructed these dwellings, but it would be difficult to imagine that anyone other than Mexicans and Native Americans did the bulk of the work. Much of the historical visual evidence of early Phoenix captures the earthen quality of the townscape; it may have been an Anglo-dominated city in 1880, but the landscape was pure Mexico (McLaughlin and McLaughlin 1970, 33-40).
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Once the railroad arrived in 1887, lumber imports improved, but by then Phoenicians had developed an affinity for fired brick. An 1889 map of the town revealed a number of remnant adobe structures, but brick was becoming a popular construction material, leading one observer to remark that "every house in town ... even that part of it occupied by the Mexicans is being encroached upon by the whites" (Luckingham 1994, 18) (Figure 1). By 1911 brick dominated building construction in Phoenix, and adobe was in decline (Montalvo 2006). Other clues to the changing landscape signaled the transition from Mexican to Anglo; to wit, in 1911 Montezuma Street and Cortez Street became First Street and First Avenue, respectively. The original public square of the city where City Hall was located was called a "plaza" in the 1870s, but that Mexican association was removed later in the same decade (Mawn 1979, 40; Garrison 2007). Nevertheless, Mexicans were allowed to use the square for patriotic celebrations, although Anglo Phoenicians considered "the Sonoran a decided annoyance" (Luckingham 1994, 18) (Figure 2).
Beyond the amnesia about Phoenix's original Mexican ancestry and the contributions of Mexicans to the early building of the city, perhaps the most problematic erasure has been the displacement of the original Mexican quarter and the resultant segregation of Mexican Phoenicians. The first Mexican quarter of the...
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