Saturday, May 2nd, 2009...7:15 am
Geography Lesson
Aside from everything else in last week’s article about Clarence Dupnik’s comments about the children of illegal immigrants, one particular sentence touched on a particular snit of mine:
Dupnik singled out the Sunnyside School District in South Tucson where he says a credible source told him one in four students are here illegally.
Setting aside the Russell Pearce style factoid repeated here, there is a much more proveable falsehood here: the Sunnyside School District is not in South Tucson. Since it is a paraphrase, I have my doubts that Dupnik made that specific mistake, but it definitely makes me wonder if the Star’s reporters and editors know anything about the geography of the portion of our community south of Broadway. Heck, their offices are on Park and Irvington, they should know something.
Okay, quick explanation: Roanoke is not in West Virginia, Donegal is not in Northern Ireland and the Sunnyside School District is not in South Tucson. Maybe you could say the South Side of Tucson, maybe you could say Southern Tucson. The name “South Tucson” refers to a separately incorporated city roughly between 26th and 40th Streets and between 2nd and 12th Avenues. The Sunnyside School district is further south, its northern boundary being, for the most part, Irvington Road.
The City of South Tucson is located entirely within the Tucson Unified School District, the closest Sunnyside school is Apollo Middle School at the corner of Liberty and Nebraska, three miles away. The Star ought to know this because they covered the tremendous controversy over the proposed closing of Ochoa Elementary in South Tucson last year. As the Star and other local media outlets said at the time, Ochoa is part of TUSD.
Yes, this is another of my patented rants over what seems like a rather minor point. But, as someone who works in South Tucson and has family connections to the South Side, I find this sort of ignorance from the local media frustrating. If some regular guy I know misses out on the nuances of South Side geography, hey, I understand. But, if that person is in the local media, and it is their job to know things like this and explain them to people, it is a real problem. If our media can’t take the care to differentiate between different South Side communities, can we trust that they are paying attention to issues that affect the South Side? If even the professionals in the media are taking the attitude “South Tucson, Sunnyside, it’s all the same,” what hope do we have to fight stereotypes people in the broader community have about people on the South Side?
9 Comments
May 2nd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Unfortunately, everyone in the media does not get that South Tucson is a separate City and that not everything bad that happens, happens in South Tucson.
May 2nd, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Thanks, Ted. You are right on this.
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Way to go, Ted! I thought only old school teachers cared about geographical accuracy. Good job.
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Right on! The local papers, especially the Star and the Weekly …
(what a rag the Weekly is — ever further to the right, and dumber than ever, e.g., criticizing on small facts Hein’s well-deserved dismissal; why does this site treat Nintzel as if he knew shinola from original reporting or contacts, because he doesn’t and hasn’t any? We can all read the Star and RRR, and call it wisdom. And Tom Danehy is Emil Franzi’s ill-informed, butt-snuffling poodle)…
insist on calling the core of the city the “south side” and identifying it exclusively with violent crime . I thought that Midvale, Sahuarita and Green Valley were the South Side; the downtown core certainly is not.
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Oh yeah… Bill Buckmaster and Jim Nintzel remind me of classic Conan Doyle … “The League of the Red-Wigged Bulshitters”.
May 2nd, 2009 at 10:21 pm
It could be worse.
I grew up in Albuquerque and later lived in Socorro, Los Lunas, Belen and Moriarty and there were regular stories in the paper about people (mostly from the east) asking about things like whether they needed to bring a passport and vaccination record with them when they visited New Mexico.
One of the funniest ones was about the guy from Alabama who stopped at the port of entry in his car. The state employee working there was asking him a few questions (I think it may have been during one of the fruitfly outbreaks and he was asking if he had any fruit in the car) and the idiot from Alabama handed him a $20 bill to try and bribe him into letting him through.
Of course the idiot was arrested and charged with trying to bribe a public official.
The other funniest one was about a Texan who at least did know that New Mexico was in the United States. He went to eat at La Fonda restaurant in Santa Fe and they brought him a plate of blue corn chips. The Texan thought the chips were moldy and promptly hired a lawyer who actually sued the La Fonda for serving rotten corn chips. Of course the suit was laughed out of court.
May 3rd, 2009 at 1:37 am
Good one, Eli.
I grew up in West Texas, where as teen-agers we drove our pick-ups and Chevies far and wide on 20 cent gas. In our rutting peregrinations, we always said, to be perfectly clear, “Old Mexico” and “New Mexico”, felt comfortable in both, and knew that what we were talking about made a difference, mostly to our tsking and disapproving parents. I always thought that the real “other” was in the cedar post chopping territory of Anglo muscle-men around Rock Springs. Those guys were at least fictionally dangerous.
Everybody crossed the “line” in those days like it was a stupid formality, which it was then and should be now.
If you’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses”, you know what I mean.
May 3rd, 2009 at 7:14 am
THANK YOU, Ted. This is something that irritates me like fingernails on a blackboard (I don’t know a 21st century equivalent for that). Tucson does exist south of 22nd Street but South Tucson doesn’t exist south of 40th Street. I’ve always used the term “Southside” to refer to the southwest portion of Tucson, (more or less the western half of LD29 and the southern part of LD27) but I don’t know if there is anything official about that.
P.S. Straight from the City of South Tucson Website: “The city boundaries are 25th Street on the north, the Union Pacific Railroad tracks on the east, 40th Street and Benson Highway on the south, and 12th Avenue on the west.”
May 3rd, 2009 at 10:34 am
Our tendency as a nation when we discuss immigration is to take a xenophobic approach. The paradox that this happens in a nation made by immigrants is striking. Until we reject our fears and act with both compassion and reason in dealing with this issue, the debate will be dominated by the peddlers of easy answers and false choices.
Economic realities are the foundation of the immigration issue. We need to confront those honestly and develop a comprehensive approach that includes not just a guest worker plan, but also a reasonable way for states and other governmental entities to be reimbursed for their costs. Dupnik is being simplistic and superficial, but the costs borne by states and municipalities are real and have to be considered along with the economic motivators that compel people to cross the border.
However, there are so many opportunities that are not being considered when deciding how to deal with this issue. An enhanced economic partnership with Mexico and Latin America that could help all nations involved to address issues such as workers’ rights, environmental protection and fair trade are all issues that could be brought into a comprehensive discussion of immigration. Why are we letting our fears instead of our hopes determine the parameters of this debate?
The priority is not, as McCain asserted in a failed attempt to suck up to the Chris Simcoxes of the world, to “secure the border.” That is but one factor to consider and most people want those who pose a true threat to our national security to be the ones we target when dealing with that one factor, not workers. Our true priority should be to deal with this issue in a manner that is humane, comprehensive, rational and builds relationships between nations and people.