Why come to Tucson?
Arizona will bring a particular emphasis on Immigration issues to the workshops, and will offer persons who can come early, or stay late, an opportunity to visit a border town (Nogales, AZ and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico) and to participate in delivering water to water stations that have been set up in places where migrants have died trying to cross large stretches of desert.
We will offer workshops on issues such as Clean Elections (public campaign financing), and on how to run successful ballot measures.
Within a 60 mile radius of Tucson is the greatest variety of flora and fauna in the continental United States, because of variations in altitude and two different rainy seasons.
It gets hot in town-- this is the desert, folks. If you choose the earlier date, you may completely miss the summer rains, and will not have to deal with humidity, which may not reach double digits. Evaporative cooling will be more effective, and you'll learn what the phrase "It's a dry heat" means, and why desert dwellers like it.
If you choose the latter date, you'll probably see summer rains, and humidity. When I was a girl, these were predictable, with clear skies in the morning, clouds by noon, sweet-smelling, hard rains at 3pm,
magnificent sunsets, and skies at 9pm where you could see every star. Global warming has made things less predictable, here as elsewhere.
We've had 7 years of drought in the last 8.
Either way, water means something new to you after you've been in the desert.
Tucson was lived in for millennia, most recently as the village of Chuk Son, where Europeans established a Spanish presidio in 1776. We were the reason for the Gadsden Purchase, for the railroad west. Statehood came in 1912, and Carl Hayden served in Congress from then until 1962. The early days of statehood were rife with populist fervor, Wobblies at the mines, women voting before national suffrage, recall, initiatives, workman's comp, when they were all radical concepts.
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