To an extent that neither its supporters nor its opponents foresaw, S.B. 1070 instantly became the most influential local law in the country. Supporters called for other states to follow Arizona’s lead, and Indiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Utah, and Alabama have all since adopted similar laws. Meanwhile, opponents organized protests and called for a boycott of the state—countered, inevitably, by out-of-state supporters, who tried to boost the Arizona economy with a “buycott.” The effects of these battling responses were hard to assess: convention revenue went down, while tourism revenue went up. But in Arizona the political effect seemed clear: that fall Brewer easily won her first gubernatorial election, by twelve percentage points. To celebrate, she wrote a book in which she cast the fight over 1070 as the defining struggle of her political career. It was called “Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border.”

Brewer’s election was really two elections at once: among white voters, she won in a landslide, sixty-one per cent to thirty-six; among Latino voters, she lost in an even bigger landslide, twenty-eight per cent to seventy-one. Many Latinos saw the law as an endorsement of the tactics of Joe Arpaio, the audacious sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. Arpaio had presided over a series of immigration sweeps, raiding workplaces and setting up checkpoints in search of residents who might be eligible for detention or deportation. As a show of force, he once staged an involuntary parade, forcing “approximately two hundred illegal aliens” to walk through the streets from one of his jails to Tent City, an outdoor detention facility. In Arizona and beyond, S.B. 1070 became conflated with the Arpaio policies that predated it.

The passing of 1070 hasn’t directly changed the lives of unauthorized immigrants in Arizona. There was added fear and uncertainty, but no mass exodus; if some recent arrivals did leave, they were likely fleeing the stalled economy, which did particular damage to the state’s construction industry. But one way to measure 1070’s impact is by the political reaction it inspired, among Latinos especially. “Latino” is a nebulous term, lumping together a disparate group of citizens with roots all over the Western Hemisphere. And, in Arizona, Latinos had not been a strong political force. Although they make up almost a third of the state’s population, they are only thirteen per cent of its electorate. By most measures, less than a quarter of Arizona’s two million Latino residents are unauthorized immigrants. But, because 1070 raised fears of state-sanctioned harassment, it encouraged a wide range of Latinos, including many whose families have been in the country for generations, to think of themselves as potential targets. “They may cook different foods, they may like a different baseball team,” Carmona says. “But you’re putting them all together, because you’re threatening their very existence.”

Last fall, a young firefighter named Daniel Valenzuela became the second Latino member of Phoenix’s city council, boosted by a group of student organizers known as Team Awesome, which helped increase the Latino vote by nearly five hundred per cent. The Latino turnout also helped elect Greg Stanton, a Democrat, as mayor. Most startling was the campaign, organized by a liberal activist named Randy Parraz, to oust Russell Pearce, the president of the Arizona Senate and the main sponsor of S.B. 1070. Last summer, Parraz’s canvassers obtained more than ten thousand signatures to trigger a recall election, which Pearce lost to another Republican. By engineering the downfall of one of the state’s most powerful legislators, Parraz wanted to prove that things were changing: even in Arizona, even in a safe Republican district, an anti-immigrant reputation could be perilous.

On a recent Saturday, Carmona climbed aboard a rented bus to take a tour of greater Phoenix, as part of a loose alliance of local Democrats, mainly Latino, all of them hoping that Carmona might become the biggest beneficiary so far of the S.B. 1070 backlash. A brand-new “Carmona for Senate” sign had been strapped to the side of the bus, and as the driver pulled onto Interstate 10, heading west, it started flapping violently in the wind. By the time the group arrived in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, one corner of the sign was completely shredded.

Carmona’s team was recording the day’s outing, gathering footage for a campaign commercial. He stood in the bus aisle, with his arms spread, being fitted for a microphone. Mary Rose Wilcox, a Democratic member of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, turned to him and said, “Do you have your briefing papers?”

Carmona pointed to his head. “Aquí,” he said.

The group disembarked onto a residential driveway, which had been transformed into a provisional community center, with folklórico dancers and boxes of cochitos, cinnamon cookies shaped like piglets. Carmona joined the cluster of politicians behind the podium, and when it was his turn he talked about his life, about having been the Surgeon General, and, in broad terms, about his agenda. “We need to bring civility back to governance,” he said. “We need to bring tolerance, we need to bring compassion, we need to bring a humane interest in each and every one of your issues.” His speech was probably less important than the time he spent in the small crowd, shaking hands and making eye contact, like a general visiting his troops.

Later that afternoon, at a house in South Phoenix that doubles as the neighborhood Democratic headquarters, Carmona accepted a commemorative pin from some fellow Special Forces veterans, and then delivered a few remarks; afterward, they swapped war stories over a plastic bowl of home-cooked posole. Carmona’s overlapping vocations have combined to make him a declarative and slightly gruff speaker, secure in his belief that every political problem represents a willful failure of common sense. And although he is roughly in agreement with President Obama on issues ranging from Afghanistan (“Hillary’s doing a great job”) to the tax code (“Let’s make it a little fair—that’s all”), he offers his critique of the Affordable Care Act as proof of his independent spirit. “Too complicated, too fast, too much thrown on the American public,” he says. “If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you’ve got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level.”

By the time he got to Grant Park, near central Phoenix, his voice was getting ragged. He talked about two of his uncles, electricians, who had tried to persuade him to join the trade after he left the military; they were more than a little put off when he said that he wanted to go to medical school. “I started to realize that sometimes our culture binds us and makes us feel like we can’t do everything that everybody else does,” he said. “We don’t break out.” And then he delved back into his biography: the story of a “poor kid” from Harlem, very much unbound by his culture, or by much of anything else.

Audiences chuckle when Carmona tells them that his father was the youngest of twenty-seven children, and that he called every adult in his abuelita’s house tía or tío, because he couldn’t keep all the aunts and uncles straight. Both of his parents were alcoholics, and he was a habitual truant, skipping school to ride the subway with his friends, in search of free entertainment. Carmona’s disinterest in school was not a disinterest in learning. When an uncle gave him ten dollars for Christmas, he bought a microscope and a dissection kit, with which he examined whatever specimens were handy: discarded fish from the market and, once, a cat carcass that he found on the street. He dropped out of school and got himself every kid’s dream job, selling hot dogs and peanuts at Shea and Yankee Stadiums. But by seventeen he no longer felt like a kid, and so he persuaded his parents to allow him to enlist in the military. It was 1967, and he didn’t know anything about Vietnam; his goal was to get his G.E.D. and make it into the Special Forces, which he did. During his years in Vietnam, he lost friends, and gradually lost faith in the wisdom of the American mission, but he returned home more skeptical than angry, and still proud of his service. War didn’t spark an interest in politics—in fact, he is attractive to Democratic strategists precisely because he has never been especially politically active.