THANKS, JOE:

In the City Council chambers here, a squat, round room that evokes the traditional Navajo home known as a "hogan," Carlos Garcia is easy to spot. His chestnut hair, long and limp, is perennially fastened in a ponytail that hangs like a string halfway down his back. His feet are shielded by a pair of weathered sneakers. One afternoon last month, he showed up for work clad in a black golf-style shirt--"That's the most dressed up you're going to see me," he quipped--with the words "City of Phoenix Councilman Carlos Garcia" embroidered over his heart.

Garcia joined the council in March, but his style remains as casual as it was during his time protesting a mother's impending deportation in front of the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in 2017, or chanting into a bullhorn outside the federal courthouse where Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio stood trial that same year, accused of racially profiling Latinos.

"One of my elders a long time ago told me, 'If you're going to be a public servant, you have to be ready when you wake up in the morning to meet with the governor and to go talk to a jornalero," Garcia says, using the Spanish word for day laborer. The elder challenged him to use the way he dresses to telegraph who he really cares for--"Is it your priority," the elder asked, "that you dress up to impress the governor?"

"My priority is to make sure people feel comfortable with me," Garcia says.

By "people," he means the people of color who for years have stood as targets of the politics of Arpaio and Jan Brewer, the former Republican governor of Arizona. Arpaio, perhaps Arizona's most nationally famous politician, rode to fame in the 1990s with his draconian jail policies and then into President Donald Trump's favor with his tough anti-immigrant posture. Brewer, as governor, in 2010 signed into law the nation's toughest immigration bill, SB 1070, powering up the "attrition through enforcement" strategy championed by some on the right to drive illegal immigrants out of the United States.

Nearly 10 years later, Garcia is part of a new wave of Latino politicians in Arizona who have entered politics in response to those policies--a legacy that Arpaio and Brewer likely did not expect. In a state that once compelled police officers to ask about the citizenship status of the people they pulled over and barred undocumented immigrants from getting driver's licenses and paying in-state tuition at public universities, a growing number of Latino activists are using the lessons they learned in organizing against the immigration crackdown to catapult themselves into elected state and local office.

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