Illustration by Edel Rodriguez

Jose Barboza was up early on March 22nd, the day of the Presidential primary in Arizona. Barboza, a twenty-four-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was volunteering for Promise Arizona, a local group dedicated to turning out Latino voters. That morning, he canvassed in the barrios of Phoenix, at the foot of the dry slopes of South Mountain, making sure that the people he had registered showed up to vote. When I interviewed him in April, in the offices of Promise Arizona, he recalled the extraordinary excitement of the primary voters. In the end, a record six hundred thousand people cast ballots in the city and the rest of Maricopa County, twice the number in 2012.

Barboza is animated and solidly built, with close-cropped hair and black, rectangular-framed glasses. He was born in Guadalajara, and when he was four years old he came to the United States with his family. He went to public schools in Phoenix, and considers himself an American. His father is a construction worker, and his mother runs the family. As he put it, “There’s her, and there’s her.”

Barboza first volunteered for Promise Arizona in the spring of 2012, when some friends who worked for the organization recruited him. At the time, he was making money by reselling cell phones at a markup. Other than that, he told me, “I wasn’t doing anything, just playing video games all day.” As a volunteer, he went from roaming the battlefields of Call of Duty to speaking with unregistered, often apathetic men and women at their homes, at strip malls, and at gas stations. The first voter he signed up lived in an apartment in West Phoenix, where Barboza was going door-to-door. Months later, Barboza returned, and took a picture of the man holding up his ballot. He posted it on Instagram, with a caption: “He was, like, take my picture, ‘Ya lo voy hacer por primera vez’ ”—“I’m going to do it for the first time.”

On Election Day four years ago, one of Barboza’s duties was to collect the vote-by-mail ballots of people who had missed the deadline for sending them in and were unable to get them to a polling place. Barboza delivered them instead, receiving an “I Voted Today” sticker for each one. “My whole body was covered with them,” he told me. “I felt like I’d voted.”

This March, on primary day, Barboza again collected and delivered ballots. At 9 P.M., Barboza headed to one of the larger polling places, at a Salvation Army in central Phoenix, where he discovered that voters had been waiting for hours. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is serious.’ ” On his smartphone, he recorded a two-minute video that showed a few hundred weary-looking people lined up on a sidewalk in the near-dark.

Barboza was not the only person to notice. That afternoon, it was reported that some voters had brought lawn chairs to sit in for the long wait, and wide-brimmed hats and umbrellas to protect them from the sun. The fact was that the county had reduced the number of polling stations to sixty. Four years earlier, there had been two hundred.

I asked Helen Purcell, the elections chief of Maricopa County, about the lines. “Obviously, it is a fact we didn’t have enough polling places,” she told me. “I’ve said repeatedly that was my error. We should have had more. We should have anticipated a more energetic group of voters.” Purcell said that the state, rather than the county, was supposed to cover the costs of the primary, but hadn’t released the funds by Election Day, forcing her to reduce the number of polling places.

In Phoenix, where Latinos make up forty per cent of the population, there was one station for every hundred and eight thousand residents. Some precincts in the south of the city, where the majority is Latino, had no polling places at all. But Purcell told me that the long lines had affected everyone in the county equally. “I’ve had twenty-seven years of doing this,” she said. “I’ve never discriminated against anyone.”

There were further problems in April, when the county misprinted the title of an initiative on 1.3 million Spanish-language ballots that were mailed to early voters. The elections office sent postcards informing voters of the error. Purcell acknowledged to me that the misprint was an embarrassment. “Every election cycle, you look at something you can do differently,” she said.

Arizona has often been called the Mississippi of the West, and state leaders are familiar with charges of racial discrimination, especially when it comes to voting rights. Native Americans in Arizona were not allowed to vote until 1948. Prior to 1975, Arizona provided campaign materials only in English, despite the large Spanish-speaking population. In 2004, the state legislature, which had been under Republican control for more than a decade, passed one of the country’s first laws requiring voters to present a state-issued I.D. at polling places. Since 2013, when the Supreme Court overturned crucial sections of the Voting Rights Act, Arizona has been able to make changes such as the recent reduction in polling stations without being subject to federal review.

The trouble extends beyond voting rights. Joe Arpaio, who has been the sheriff of Maricopa County since 1993, is known nationally for conducting what he calls “saturation patrols,” in which his deputies stop motorists in Latino neighborhoods and check their immigration papers. In 2011, in the course of a class-action suit brought against the county by the American Civil Liberties Union, a federal court issued an injunction against Arpaio’s policy of detaining people based on their immigration status. Arpaio continued anyway, and now faces possible criminal charges. He is running for his seventh term this fall.

In recent years, as infringements on the rights of Latinos have increased, activist groups have proliferated. In Arizona, the key event provoking this activism occurred on April 19, 2010, when the state legislature passed a bill that contained the most Draconian set of anti-immigrant measures in recent American history. The bill, which was sponsored by Russell Pearce, a state senator who represented Mesa,* codified the saturation patrols, requiring state police to check the immigration status of anyone they detained. It also prohibited undocumented immigrants from working, and criminalized the failure to carry immigration documents.

The week that the bill passed, Petra Falcon, who has worked on behalf of Latinos in Arizona for forty years, convened a “vigil team” of seven people on the lawn of the state capitol. During the day, they prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe that Governor Jan Brewer would issue a veto. At night, they slept in tents. Even after Brewer signed the bill, the group continued their protest. That July, a federal judge ruled that some of the more controversial provisions—including those related to police patrols, employment, and identification requirements—were unlawful, and the Supreme Court eventually agreed. Falcon ended the vigil, and founded Promise Arizona.

So far, Falcon told me, the organization has registered forty-six thousand voters in Maricopa County—about a quarter of all new registrations. It has also continued the work that Falcon has done since 1992, helping Latino candidates in Arizona to get elected and supporting immigration reform. This year, Falcon has joined her voter-registration efforts with those of One Arizona, a Phoenix-based coalition of Latino registration groups. Together, they hope to register seventy-five thousand voters before the election this fall.