Reflections on Arizona

Often, the absence of something reveals its most essential qualities. Leaving Arizona for college in Georgia, I learned more about my home state in three months than I had in eighteen years living there. Coming home for winter break, Arizona’s paradoxes and absurdities, its underlying schisms and all-encompassing emptiness, became inescapable to me.

Arizona is a tonal center for my family. We move around scales, play dissonant chords and fourths and fifths, but ultimately must resolve back home. Everyone contains a personal black hole, a place or person or thing that exerts a gravitational pull, where we return to over and over. For my family, Arizona is that black hole. My parents are from India, and moved to Arizona in 2005, when I was two. Since then, we lived in short stints everywhere from Washington, D.C. to North Carolina to Hyderabad, forced to move often because of visa issues and job changes. But somehow, by pure chance, the moves have always been temporary, eventually forcing us back to the Phoenix metropolitan area. This is ironic, because Arizona suits no one in my family. My dad and brother are both aquaphiles. My dad becomes ecstatic when seeing a river or lake on road trips, and my brother’s favorite hobby is swimming. Yet, we live in one of the driest states. My mother belongs somewhere like California, where she may do yoga outside and go on walks and look at flowers, instead of being stuck inside for two to four months a year. They constantly discuss moving, but inertia, in combination with some invisible attachment to the place, always prevents them.

In 2020, Arizona flipped from red to blue. We made national headlines; election analysts attributed the shift to the growth of Arizona’s suburbs, which now lean Democratic. Only two months later, my state featured in the news again, as an Arizonan man named Jacob Chansley, also known as “QAnon Shaman,” stormed the United States Capitol building, shirtless and adorning a viking hat.

Arizona is in constant tension. One impulse pulls us towards normality; towards the moderate, establishment respectability that binds together figures like John McCain and Mark Kelly. Another impulse engenders the fringe, the occult, and bizarre; the conspiracy theorists and wackos, exemplified by Chansley, young Kyrsten Sinema, and Sedona’s vortex spots. The former impulse hates extremes and adores the center, which is why Martha McSally, who spoke incessantly about the ‘radical Left’ and endorsed Trump’s wall, lost twice. The impulse towards normality is gaining power, at the expense of our oddity. This is why I think Sinema will lose in 2024. Her 2018 campaign emphasized how boring she was, how she had changed from her tutu-wearing past into a mature adult who spoke about healthcare and taxes. But as she gains attention in the media, for her odd outfits and even odder vote choices, it becomes evident that her past never really left. And I think Arizona will punish her for this—for all her moderation in policy, what Arizona really craves is to starve its weird half of oxygen. But Democrats need not fret; the state-level GOP, with its exemplary figures of Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Kelli Ward, faces a daunting path forward for similar reasons.

I am a liberal, and I despise the cultural and political rot represented by extremist movements like QAnon and Trumpism. And yet, in a strange way, a small part of me cannot help but lament as I see Arizona’s hegemonic suburb-liberalism snuff out our homegrown radicals. I do not harbor any sympathy whatsoever for the actual politics of those individuals; rather, I wish Arizonan idiosyncrasy manifest itself in more healthy ways. Despite what the news may portray, crazed buffoons trying to steal elections do not control our politics, though we should remain vigilant of their threat. Rather, our politics submit to polo-shirt-wearing forty-year olds who moved from California because the taxes are too high and have two kids and a dog and live in rows and rows of identical cookie-cutter homes. And this is a depressing fact.

The very existence of Phoenix reveals its inherent contradictions. There is no reason a city like this, with highways and golf courses and thousand-square-feet lawns, should exist in such an unforgiving desert. We imagine ourselves to be like every other city, we aspire to be like every other city, but ignore the alien landscape we live in. The warming climate threatens this purposeful obliviousness; eventually, 140 degree temperatures will prevent us from outrunning Nature and reality. But for now, we may continue to play-act and shape the environment to our conformist wants, instead of acceding to the will of the desert. One may easily imagine a different Phoenix. A Phoenix with density instead of sprawl. With respect towards water and the desert landscape, instead of wastefulness. With unique, experimental, but forward-facing, politics, forged from our unique, experimental context, instead of the binary options of milquetoast liberalism and batshit craziness.

A friend of mine is into movies. Out of boredom, we once played a game where I would name a state and he would attempt to offer a film or show set there. I tried to stump him, to no avail. Arkansas? Minari. Vermont? Dead Poets Society. Even Idaho has Napoleon Dynamite. But then I asked about Arizona. He contemplated for a moment, and then answered, “That scene in Arrested Development where Michael decides to move to Phoenix, but then immediately leaves because the airport taxi door-handle is too hot.”

There are no Arizonan stereotypes. In contrast, our next-door neighbor, California, occupies a sprawling empire in the American mythology. It is a mystical land of douchebag skaters and vegan stoners, of pungent hippies and egotistic entrepreneurs, of Valley girls and Bernie Bros. Utah has its Mormons and skiers; Colorado, granola types and fitness freaks. But Arizona? We represent an abyss, an imaginatory void. Arizonans do not possess any accent; we lack the y’alls and ain’t sprinkled in Southern speak. Ohio is known for being boring, but at least it’s known for something. But in a way, Arizona’s cultural vacuity is positive. When I tell people where I’m from, they fail to find any preconception to attach to me. Their minds search desperately for a joke or witty remark to make—something like the “Oh, you must be a hipster” that Oregonians get, or the corn jokes Iowans despise—but ultimately, they find nothing to say, besides “It sure gets hot there!” And so, I remain a tabula rasa, freed from the oppressive baggage of background.

In early 2021, Arizona’s basketball team, the Phoenix Suns, reached the NBA finals. Arizona’s sports teams are usually uniformly terrible, so this marked a notable event. I am not a fan of sports by any means. I do not understand the rules of football or baseball, and generally scorned the perceived obnoxiousness of sports fans. However, during that NBA season, I unashamedly joined the bandwagon. I watched every finals game, often at bars or restaurants with my friends, and even went to the stadium to watch a televised away game. And it was incredible. The Suns provided a locus to “rally the valley,” giving a sense of community, fraternity, and shared purpose to the Phoenix metropolitan area. And it helped me feel like I actually lived somewhere: a living, specific location with actual characteristics. I felt, perhaps for the first time, pride in a place. This feeling is probably common to regular sports enthusiasts, but the Suns’ historic run expanded the boundaries of that experience beyond that limited social bubble. And though the Suns lost and the feeling eventually dissipated, the warm embers of that pride remained for some time.

In Arizona, I lived in the city of Chandler. Like all Phoenix suburbs, the population of Chandler, Arizona rose dramatically in recent decades. In 1980, the city contained less than 30,000 people; now, the population is around 270,000. Historically, Chandler’s main industries included agriculture and ranching. Today, its top employers include Intel and Wells Fargo. Chandler is a liminal space, resting in the space between modernity and history, urbanization and agrarianism. Mornings before high school, I would gaze upon the vast green landscape of the alfalfa farm across from my house, the stench of cow manure wafting through the air. Only moments later, I would pass Price Corridor, a massive complex of multistory office buildings. Google’s Waymo division selected Chandler as its first test site for autonomous vehicles. And so, Chandler is perhaps the only place in the world where it is commonplace to see a driverless car next to someone riding a horse.

As Chandler grows, the alfalfa farms and cattle ranches and horse stables shrink further into the margins. We march towards the homogeneous non-place that is American suburbia; one day, we will become indistinguishable from the Alpharettas and Edisons and Evanstons of the world. Luckily, we contain enough weirdness to stave off this inevitability for at least some time. Chandler hosts an “Ostrich Festival” every year, inspired by Chandler’s early history of ostrich farming. Even as the festival grows more and more commercialized and similar to any other carnival every year, it is still pretty fucking weird that we have an annual event dedicated to ostriches. Every Christmas, Chandler lights a large Christmas tree made of tumbleweeds, complete with a parade. We have a park that used to be a working landfill; the city simply covered it with rocks to hide its shameful past.

The cultural center of my town is probably the mall, named Chandler Fashion Mall. We lack the agora of ancient Athens; we must settle instead for Panda Express and H\&M. The mall is where teenagers and adults alike gather, shop, and bond. The mall encloses my most formative memories. It is where my friends and I made immature jokes in the Spencer’s store and spilled secrets in the Starbucks; it is where we watched a mother drag her crying child, who left poop stains on the linoleum floor, and where my once-closest friend came out to me. I imagine the mall serves as a similar purpose for other Chandler denizens.

The mall was also my personal cultural center, for a very different reason. As this piece repeatedly implies, the Phoenix suburbs are, by and large, a cultural vacuum. And how I desired culture! Throughout high school, I craved desperately to live somewhere like New York City or San Francisco, where I imagined I could cultivate a sophisticated taste in art and architecture and music; I longed to be inundated by culture, wanted culture left and right and up and down. But I lived in Chandler, and so I made do. Inside Chandler Fashion Mall exists a franchise of Barnes and Noble. And this is where I’d spent many of my weekends, sipping on the intoxicating words of Dostoevsky and Orwell to escape the perceived superficiality of the world outside.

I do not mean to sound like I am complaining. In fact, I am actually glad for Chandler’s lack of cultural refinement. I appreciate its various aesthetic travesties, appreciate its homogeneously hideous houses and drab dirt lots. Because Chandler forced me to find beauty wherever I could find it. In printed words on a page, in a pastel-pink sunset, in a cactus flower in full bloom. And only the suburban part of suburban Arizona is ugly. You need only to venture a few miles out from the islands of indistinguishable houses and strip malls before encountering Arizona’s saving grace, its natural beauty. What we lack in culture, we make up for in mountain peaks and stately saguaros, otherworldly ocotillos and the sublime.

My new home of Athens, Georgia hosts an annual event called PorchFest. Neighborhood residents lend their porches to local musicians, who play for free for anyone who walks by. To me, this represents the ideal urban innovation. PorchFest fosters community, bringing together residents and students outdoors for a day dedicated to sharing music. It highlights Athens’ dynamic music scene and facilitates the discovery of local artists. PorchFest might work in Flagstaff, Arizona’s analogue to Athens, or maybe Sedona. But it could never work in Phoenix. For starters, most of us lack porches. Beyond that, however, Phoenix is too spread out, its neighborhoods too replete with isolated boxes, for PorchFest to work. But there is no reason we cannot invent creations like PorchFest of our own, tailored to the specifics of our home. And there is no reason we cannot chart a new course for Phoenix, a desert urbanism centered around community and connection.

Last summer, the summer before college, I explored Phoenix more than I ever had growing up. Emboldened by the possession of a car and free time, I exhausted the city of its nooks and crannies. I attended open mic nights and improv shows with friends, I made repeat visits to the Phoenix Art Museum and the Desert Botanical Gardens, and I ate at the most interesting restaurants I could find. The Perch in Chandler, which also functions as a rescued bird sanctuary; Otro Cafe, which made some of the best vegan Mexican food I’ve ever had. I sampled Phoenix’s best ice cream, including Novel Ice Cream in Midtown, which makes ice cream sandwiches with donuts, and Sweet Republic, whose mint ice cream tasted like actual mint and not toothpaste. Beyond the beige buildings and lifeless freeways, Phoenix contains a soul.

Arizona is, in many respects, undefinable. I focused here mostly on the Phoenix metropolitan area because that is what I am most familiar with, but Arizona contains staggering multitudes. The north ripples with forests, the Grand Canyon, and the mesmeric red rocks of Sedona. The desolate beauty of deserts defines the rest of the state. I bemoan Phoenix’s lack of culture in this piece, but perhaps this is because our metropolis is one of diaspora. No one has been here for long, from the Sudanese refugees to the Californians to my Indian-American parents. We are all still figuring this strange, paradoxical place out. And perhaps there is a beauty in being somewhere empty. Perhaps there is beauty in watching a culture grow, and contributing—in our small, miniscule ways—to that fledgling seed we call a home.