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  1. Arizona is, particularly currently, an unhappy state. They have a sheriff of their main population center, Mariposa County, who will have the infamy of Bull Connor in a decade or two (and fie and welcome to it for him.) There are large numbers of Hispanic neighborhoods that are now empty, family businesses with ethnic foods and themes are gone, erased as people try desperately to disidentify themselves with Hispanic culture, or move somewhere else, even if they’re citizens, to avoid the ramifications of the anti-immigration laws and attitudes that are growing in that state. There is a political vitriol that is poisoning everything from the interactions of citizens and their government to the state government and the federal government. The state government is desperately attempting to retain legitimacy even while its leaders are attempting to denigrate the very idea of ‘big government,’ for a portion of the population for whom the mere idea of government makes it already too ‘large.’

    I am not surprised at the plethora of US flags even at First Nations locations. It is much the same: Red, white, and blue camouflage and hoping that Nativist* eyes pass over you.

    I mentioned Vegas earlier. Arizona, too, is in a similar state of desperate consciousness. Far from mocking the state, however, I am concerned by it: It is representative of what the politics of distrust, disunion, and fear have wrought. And it is tearing apart every heritage that it can, without concern for history or richness of culture, replacing it with pre-faded jeans, pre-processed fast food, and pre-vetted media.

    This being said… the trading post sounds like a wonderful little place of history and reality in the midst of Arizona. Should I ever bring myself to go there, I would definitely try to go there!

    * – Nativist! Such a term loaded for bear with irony! Minutemen, militias, citizen border patrols, scrambling to protect themselves and their homes from the evil illegal immigrant, who will come and take jobs at lower than minimum wage that few citizens would themselves take! How long does it take before the immigrant or the conqueror becomes the ‘native?’ Clearly less than two hundred years, perhaps even — to go by the rancor directed at Irish and Italian immigrants in the early 20th Century — barely a hundred. Memories, after all, are short.

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