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Description
This thesis explores the role of film industry boosterism in Arizona from 1911 to 2014; it argues that boosters consistently employed film as a promotional tool toward building state identity for Arizona. These boosters harnessed a variety of strategies catered specifically to a combination of personal interests and historical circumstances. Consequently, their efforts produced a variety of identities for Arizona that changed over time as new generations of boosters addressed different concerns. These state identities that boosters wanted to build relied heavily on the power of perception, often attempting to overcome or reinforce stereotypical imagery and iconography associated with Arizona. Over time, boosters used the film industry to project Arizona as: a modern and progressive state that had outgrown its frontier past; an ideal setting to make films that relived the mythical Wild West; a film-friendly place of business ideally suited for Hollywood production; and a cultural haven for filmic sophistication. Textual analysis of primary sources comprises the methodology of this thesis. Primary sources include historical newspapers, such as the Arizona Republican, and archival records of Arizona's past governors, including Governors Jack R. Williams and Raul H. Castro. These sources constitute valuable documentation created by boosters in the course of their day-to-day activities promoting Arizona, providing a window into their aspirations, worldviews and strategies. Personal interviews with active and retired members of Arizona's film boosting community are also included as primary source material, intended to capture firsthand accounts of filmic activity in the state. Using these sources as its foundation, this thesis fills a gap in the historiography by analyzing the relationship between the film industry and Arizona's state identity. While a handful of scholarly works have discussed Arizona's film history to a minor extent, they tend to take a pure narrative approach, or offer a "behind-the-scenes" look that focuses on the production aspects of films shot in Arizona. No other work focuses explicitly on boosterism or explores the statewide meaning of Arizona's film history over such a comprehensive period of time. Thus, this thesis offers a previously neglected history of both film and Arizona.
ContributorsEhrfurth, Ryan (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Vandermeer, Philip (Committee member) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Historians typically view the postwar suburban metropolis from one of two vantages: from the vantage of urban capital as it flowed out of central cities into new automobile suburbs, where a new suburban culture emerged and flourished after 1945, or from the vantage of central cities, which become progressively hollowed out, leaving behind badly deteriorated inner-city services and facilities. Rarely, however, do historians view the postwar suburban metropolis from the vantage of peripheral small towns and rural countrysides. This study looks at the “metropolitan revolution” from the outside in, as the metropolis approached and then absorbed a landscape of farms and ranches centered on a small farm-service town. As a case study, it focuses on Tempe, Arizona, a town and rural countryside eight miles east of Phoenix.
During the postwar period, Tempe became part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Agricultural production in Tempe yielded to suburban development, as a producer-oriented landscape of farms and ranches became a consumer-oriented landscape of residential subdivisions and university buildings. Intangible goods such as higher education eclipsed tangible goods such as grain, dairy, and cotton. Single-family houses supplanted farmland; shopping centers with parking lots undermined main street businesses; irrigation water became domestic water; and International-style university buildings displaced vernacular neighborhoods rooted in the early history of the settlement. In Tempe, the rural agricultural landscape gave way to a suburban landscape. But in important ways, the former shaped the latter, as the suburban metropolis inherited the underlying form and spatial relationships of farms and ranches.
During the postwar period, Tempe became part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Agricultural production in Tempe yielded to suburban development, as a producer-oriented landscape of farms and ranches became a consumer-oriented landscape of residential subdivisions and university buildings. Intangible goods such as higher education eclipsed tangible goods such as grain, dairy, and cotton. Single-family houses supplanted farmland; shopping centers with parking lots undermined main street businesses; irrigation water became domestic water; and International-style university buildings displaced vernacular neighborhoods rooted in the early history of the settlement. In Tempe, the rural agricultural landscape gave way to a suburban landscape. But in important ways, the former shaped the latter, as the suburban metropolis inherited the underlying form and spatial relationships of farms and ranches.
ContributorsHallam, Nathan (Author) / Vandermeer, Philip (Thesis advisor) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The act of moving water across basins is a recent phenomenon in Arizona water policy. This thesis creates a narrative arc for understanding the long-term issues that set precedents for interbasin water transportation and the immediate causes--namely the passage of the seminal Groundwater Management Act (GMA) in 1980--that motivated Scottsdale, Mesa, and Phoenix to acquire rural farmlands in the mid-1980s with the intent of transporting the underlying groundwater back to their respective service areas in the immediate future. Residents of rural areas were active participants in not only the sales of these farmlands, but also in how municipalities would economically develop these properties in the years to come. Their role made these municipal "water farm" purchases function as exchanges. Fears about the impact of these properties and the water transportation they anticipated on communities-of-origin; the limited nature of economic, fiscal, and hydrologic data at the time; and the rise of private water speculators turned water farms into a major political controversy. The six years it took the legislature to wrestle with the problem at the heart this issue--the value of water to rural communities--were among its most tumultuous. The loss of key lawmakers involved in GMA negotiations, the impeachment of Governor Evan Mecham, and a bribery scandal called AZScam collectively sidetracked negotiations. Even more critical was the absence of a mutual recognition that these water farms posed a problem and the external pressure that had forced all parties involved in earlier groundwater-related negotiations to craft compromise. After cities and speculators failed to force a bill favorable to their interests in 1989, a re-alignment among blocs occurred: cities joined with rural interests to craft legislation that grandfathered in existing urban water farms and limited future water farms to several basins. In exchange, rural interests supported a bill to create a Phoenix-area groundwater replenishment district that enabled cooperative management of water supplies. These two bills, which were jointly signed into law in June 1991, tentatively resolved the water farm issue. The creation of a groundwater replenishment district that has subsidized growth in Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima Counties, the creation water bank to store unused Central Arizona Project water for times of drought, and a host of water conservation measures and water leases enabled by the passage of several tribal water rights settlements have set favorable conditions such that Scottsdale, Mesa, and Phoenix never had any reason to transport any water from their water farms. The legacy of these properties then is that they were the product of the intense urgency and uncertainty in urban planning premised on assumptions of growing populations and complementary, inelastic demand. But even as per capita water consumption has declined throughout the Phoenix-area, continued growth has increased demand, beyond the capacity of available supplies so that there will likely be a new push for rural water farms in the foreseeable future.
ContributorsBergelin, Paul (Author) / Hirt, Paul (Thesis advisor) / Vandermeer, Philip (Committee member) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013