(folk music) - Good evening and welcome to Horizonte, a show that takes a look at the current issues through a Hispanic lens.

I'm your Horizonte host for tonight, Yolanda Garcia, from 12 News in Espanol.

And tonight we'll talk to the author of a new book that tells an effort that led to the recall of one of the most powerful politicians in Arizona, who was behind Arizona's controversial anti-immigrant law, Senate Bill 1070.

Randy Parraz led that fight and has written a book about it.

The book is called Dignity by Fire, Dismantling Arizona's Anti-Immigrant Machine.

In a moment, I'll talk to Parraz about his new book, and how the fight is not over.

But before we do that, here's a clip of an interview by Arizona's Horizon, Ted Simon with Russell Pierce before he was ousted in the recall election.

- Why do you think you are facing a recall?

Why do you think this is happening?

- Well, it is pretty clear I think.

It started the year before I was even elected.

It's about SP 1070 more than anything else.

The guy that started this is a Berkeley trained community organizer, not in my district, who started to protest a year before I was elected for this term.

And he's the same guy that brought groups down to the capitol, threw the American flag on the ground, trampled it, children were trampling it.

This is a really ugly group of people, the start of this recall.

- So when you were quoted saying you think outsiders have hijacked the will of Mesa voters, you still believe that?

- Well, let me tell you and let's qualify that term.

What's happened is, this is an outside group of liberals in a district that selected a Republican.

And they come through the back door, refusing to go through the process that our founders set up.

And that's a primary where your party nominates you.

See, this is a Republican that is endorsed by the Democrats.

He's endorsed by the left.

And to me, I mean, pretty sad when you come through the back door, refuse to do the primary process.

We have an election every two years, every two years, and that's a good process.

And I believe the short term.

I want a short leash on you.

I wanna remember what you've done good, and I wanna remember if you've not kept those promises.

And that's why we have an election every two years.

This recall is an abuse of the process.

Now, it's for keeping my promise, not for doing anything wrong, it's for keeping my promises and being successful.

- Here now is Randy Parraz, the community activist who led the successful recall effort against Arizona Senate President, Russell Pierce, and author of the book, Dignity by Fire, Dismantling Arizona's Anti-Immigrant Machine.

Thank you for joining us today.

- Well, thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

- Randy, how do you feel to listen to this clip?

Because I'm sure you've seen it before.

How do you feel to see it 10 years plus later?

- It's just amazing to hear him talk and speak the way he does, totally disrespecting laws because everything about a recall is not only is it the law, it's been part of the constitution of Arizona.

So there was no backdoor, there was no this and that.

He knew about the law.

It's on the books that hold extreme politicians accountable.

We apply the law.

Everything we did with was legal and constitutional.

He refuses to acknowledge that there's been only one successful recall in the history of Arizona, and it would happen to be him, because of his politics.

And he says that Republican candidate was endorsed by liberals.

The Ag Republican candidate was also endorsed by Republicans and conservatives.

Some conservatives who actually voted for Russell Pierce before.

He leaves out part of the story that just shows that he had just lost touch, and that a group of people came together.

Imagine that, liberals and conservatives, folks from different faiths came together, one of the most diverse coalitions ever to send a different message to defeat hate and the extremism of Russell Pierce and to move Arizona in a better direction, and to basically shut down the anti-immigrant machine.

And since the recall, there's not been one significant anti-immigrant piece of legislation on the scale of SB 1070.

- Randy, we've seen a pattern in Arizona.

Arizona has been the base or the open door for this type of laws.

After Russell Pierce was recalled from office, do you think that it's over?

- Well, it depends.

It's (Randy speaking indistinctly) over for the last decade, it's been over, but you know with politics, they keep going back to that.

So it's up to us as citizens to make the determination that we don't go back to that situation.

Unfortunately, progress does not move in just one direction.

It can go forwards and can go backwards.

And so it depends on citizens.

But for a citizens group getting together called Citizens for Better Arizona, Russell Pierce may have still been in power.

Not only did we remove from office, we permanently retired him and his like in that type of politics permanently.

He's never been able to come back.

He tried, we defeated him again Republican primary.

So this is about pushing our very racist, extremist ideological position, and hoping that you can stay in power to do those type of harm to people who are here trying to make a living and raise their families and send their kids to school.

- Randy, what motivated you to come up with this book.

- Just as each year passed after it, we understood it was a significant moment when it occurred, but as each year passed and we saw other Republicans coming together and we saw a new Senate president was elected after Russell Pierce.

His name was Steve Pierce.

And he put every anti-immigrant piece of legislation in the drawer never to see the light of day.

We saw us because we got rid of Russell Pierce.

We actually got Jam Brewer, the same government who wagged a finger on President Obama's face actually signed on a Medicaid expansion, that now 10 years later has given almost 500,000 low income Arizonans healthcare.

I mean, that was just a powerful thing.

So I think what motivated me to really get involved in this was realizing that when the system breaks down, (Randy speaking indistinctly) when political parties, the Democrats Republicans are unable to put forth candidates who really represent the core stream of their parties, whether it's Republican or... there's nothing wrong with being conservative, but there's something beyond being conservative, which is more extreme.

That's where Russell Pierce was at.

That's what really got me to the point and say, "Look, my own point of..." What's my threshold for injustice, it was not just... Russell Pierce at one point was just the Senator of Mesa.

Then he became president of the Senate for whole state of Arizona.

And that was my threshold for injustice.

I could not sit back, living in Scottsdale and not get involved in an issue where this now person was gonna set the agenda for the whole state.

- What are the techniques that you have in your book that brought down Russell Pierce about more than 10 years ago that we can probably use them right now not to get to that point that we were when SB 1070 was signed?

- It's just all organizing is reorganizing.

There's always a minority.

What most people didn't realize is that there was already a minority of Republicans who were fed up with Russell Pierce's brand of politics.

And there's also a silent majority of Republicans who just were not engaged.

And so we when you do this type of work, you start talking to people, knocking on doors.

We found out in January of 2011, Russell Pierce became Senate president, we found out almost two out of three voters in his district that he claims he was 16 and 0, that when we asked them how they felt about Russell Pierce being president of the Senate, two outta three people said, "Who was Russell Pierce?"

This was after SB 1070, after the marches, after the boy cuts, after all that national and international news, two out of three people in his district did not know who he was.

And so people now today need to realize a lot of the politics does not penetrate down to the local level.

So that creates opportunities.

So all we did was put together different recipe using some of the same ingredients out there, and just mix it up differently, and we're able to bring again, a coalition of people to process their pain and anger, and do it publicly.

Ask other people to sign on to petition to hold Russell Pierce accountable.

- How can the community in general stay together to prevent this from happening again in Arizona and in the country?

- It has to come down to engagement.

We'll see who comes out of these most recent elections after November, and we may have to do a recall again.

Someone else who's gonna try and take that same extremist agenda and plant that flag.

Citizens have to be willing to come together, form a committee, put money into it and start moving forward and engage.

The only way we can hold them accountable is that citizens have to speak up.

It's not just voting.

You could be done in voting in a couple minutes.

We're talking about a process of engagement that may involve you putting hours in here, walking, talking, doing other things.

That's the solution is having citizens who are engaged, are not gonna sit back quietly, allow extreme politicians come forward and push an agenda that's illegal, unconstitutional, and is racist, and that targets parts of our community, people who are part of the social fabric of Arizona.

We cannot stay quiet when those types of politicians get elected.

- And for what I see, is not a matter of parties, it's a matter of being a human person, or being human and reacting to what is being done to my neighbor.

- Yeah, absolutely.

We found lots of Republicans who were conservative, but also didn't hate immigrants.

They didn't hate Latinos.

Some were even bilingual and spoke Spanish.

Some actually wanted immigration reform.

It didn't mean they weren't Republican or conservative, they just had understanding of just basic command.

They just saw things differently, but weren't going to the extreme as a Russell Pierce.

Russell Pierce had associated with people and started propagating very racist beliefs and ideas, and started thinking he even become emboldened.

And then he got rewarded for it.

He got rewarded for SB 1070 by a small minority Republican and say, "Hey, come on up and we're gonna make you be president of the Senate."

And for me that was just a bridge too far and for thousands of other people.

Russell Pierce doesn't talk about that.

He was not only defeated, he was defeated by double digits in our special election.

And then in our primary nine months later, he was beaten in his own Republican primary, in a very conservative... more conservative than before by double digits again by another Republican.

And so that's how extreme his politics has gotten.

So he needs to really come to terms with who he had become versus trying to blame some outside liberal organizer, agitator.

It was more about him becoming someone that the voters, because I couldn't even vote in that election, the voters at Mesa said that was enough.

- Randy, at a personal level, did you feel that when you started like, "I'm gonna take the lead in this campaign or in this topic."

Did you feel that it was going to get to that point?

- Initially I felt confident that we could actually get enough signatures, but I couldn't control the right candidate coming forward, because when we started this, we knew from the outset, we could not run a Democrat.

This is a red district Republicans.

We need a Republican to come forward who'd be willing to challenge Russell Pierce, but still not be anti-immigrant and be hateful and be racist.

And so we are confident though if we actually create that space for them to maneuver, Republicans to maneuver, that the right candidate would eventually come forward.

And we did our part by getting the signatures and trying to keep all Democrats out of the race, to make it a one-on-one match between Russell Pierce and our candidate that came along was Jerry Lewis.

And then to counter that, Russell Pierce tried to run a scam, a Sham candidate named Olivia Cortez, and that was exposed right before the election.

- Well, thank you, Randy, thank you for being with us tonight.

And that's our show for tonight, for Horizonte and Arizona PBS.

I'm Yolanda Garcia.

Have a good evening.

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