Arizona
On February 10, 2011, Tucson politicians and activists representing at least three political parties launched the Facebook page "Start our State", seeking to secede from Arizona. The idea, first proposed in the 1980s by Hugh Holub, began to gather steam quickly after a front-page article about the movement in the Arizona Daily Star on February 24, 2011. Around 1986, Holub proposed to separate Arizona at the Gila River (between Phoenix and Tucson, which until the Gadsden Purchase in 1853 also formed part of the Mexico – United States border) following the election of Governor Evan Mecham, who, before being impeached and removed from office, cancelled the state's celebration of Martin Luther King Day. (This led to a widespread economic boycott of Arizona.)
Partition gained new advocates during the governorship of Jan Brewer. The nascent movement, which excoriates Brewer's "open chauvinism," appears committed to making Pima County (and possibly surrounding counties, and part of New Mexico) the State of Baja Arizona. Pima County, by itself, is larger in area than both New Jersey and Connecticut, and has a population greater than Vermont and Delaware.
Read more about this topic: List Of U.S. State Partition Proposals
Famous quotes containing the word arizona:
“Desert rains are usually so definitely demarked that the story of the man who washed his hands in the edge of an Arizona thunder shower without wetting his cuffs seems almost credible.”
—Administration in the State of Ariz, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The Great Arizona Desert is full of the bleaching bones of people who waited for me to start something.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)