Can Latinos Swing Arizona?

Fighting to vote in the Mississippi of the West.

- Hector Tobar

JOSE BARBOZA was up early on March 22nd, the day of the Presidential primary in Arizona. Barboza, a twenty-four-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was volunteering for Promise Arizona, a local group dedicated to turning out Latino voters. That morning, he canvassed in the barrios of Phoenix, at the foot of the dry slopes of South Mountain, making sure that the people he had registered showed up to vote. When I interviewed him in April, in the offices of Promise Arizona, he recalled the extraordinary excitement of the primary voters. In the end, a record six hundred thousand people cast ballots in the city and the rest of Maricopa County, twice the number in 2012.

Barboza is animated and solidly built, with close-cropped hair and black, rectangular-framed glasses. He was born in Guadalajara, and when he was four years old he came to the United States with his family. He went to public schools in Phoenix, and considers himself an American. His father is a construction worker, and his mother runs the family. As he put it, “There’s her, and there’s her.”