The white European-American population of Arizona cannot trace back ancestry within the region. About a hundred years ago there were only 200,000 people living in the desert that became a state. Until air conditioning was universal, white people were elsewhere. I have two books to recommend.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather is a novelized biography of a Spanish priest who lived in the late 1800’s and served Indians and Mexicans living in territory that would later become Arizona and New Mexico. European-Americans have little presence in the novel. It is a great piece of American literature.
Blood Meridian by Cormac MacCarthy has to be the least forgettable book written about the Mexican-American War. It takes a stomach for slaughter to finish the book and the author actually apologizes in the afterword for his descriptions of brutality.
It matters that the indigenous Arizonan is not of European descent. Sure, we need border control and advanced technology for ID cards. But ethnocentric exclusionism is particularly misplaced in Arizona.
This runs in tandem with Rand Paul and his “Lonesome Rhodes” candidacy.