Peralta stared at me and grunted. Then, “Let’s go for a ride.”
He didn’t ask about Lindsey. But considering he was a good friend of the former Arizona governor who was Secretary of Homeland Security, he probably knew more about my wife than I did. I looked down, feeling my face burn.
***
The three of us fit easily into his pickup, which sat high off the road. He drove down 35th Avenue past warehouses and the entrances to half-century-old subdivisions of faded ranch houses. This was Maryvale, Phoenix’s first automobile suburb, laid down starting in the late 1950s. It was aging badly, like most of the city. This was a hunter-gatherer place, and when one location was used up the people with means simply moved farther out. They left behind thousands of tract ranch-style houses that could never be rehabbed as historic homes, could usually not even justify a home-improvement loan. Maryvale would never be gentrified.
In ten minutes, we pulled into a dilapidated shopping strip. But every store was occupied. One sign promised “celulares,” while another went with a thriving carniceria, a butcher store. One of the ubiquitous 99-cent stores held down the far end. Peralta parked directly in front of the yerberia.
For most of its history, Phoenix had not been a Hispanic city-that was Tucson, where roots went back to the Spanish conquest, even though an Irishman technically founded the Old Pueblo. Phoenix was the brash newcomer, established by Civil War veterans and assorted fortune seekers in the late 19th century. While it always had a Mexican-American population with its own proud history, the city maintained much of its Southern roots into the early 1960s. Then it started to change with enormous population growth from the Midwest. Tucson was culturally Hispanic and old. Phoenix was mostly Anglo and new.
That distinction started to change with the massive migrations from Mexico and Central America that began in the 1980s. Millions of new immigrants came through Phoenix and many stayed, working in restaurant kitchens, landscaping services, and building houses. If that wasn’t enough to destabilize the old Mexican-American population, the city razed many of the poor but historic old barrios to expand the airport. City Hall didn’t give a thought to bulldozing Santa Rita Hall, where Cesar Chavez began his hunger strike in 1972. All that was left there now was the Sagrado Corazón church, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The large Hispanic population moved into Maryvale as the Anglos bought new houses on the city fringes. As a result, Maryvale, the whitest of suburbs in the 1960s, was now almost entirely Latino. The same thing was happening all over the older parts of the city except in the Anglo historic districts. If you hadn’t been in Phoenix since 1980, you’d be amazed at the Spanish-language signage alone-including that marking the ubiquitous herbal healing stores called yerberias.
