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"A smart, well-documented book about a group of people determined to hold the powerful to account."—2021 NPR "Books We Love"
"Journalism at its best."—2022 Southwest Books of the Year: Top Pick
A 2021 Immigration Book of the Year, Immigration Prof Blog
Investigative Reporters & Editors Book Award Finalist 2021
How Latino activists brought down powerful Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block spent years chronicling the human consequences of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s relentless immigration enforcement in Maricopa County, Arizona. In Driving While Brown, they tell the tale of two opposing movements that redefined Arizona’s political landscape—the restrictionist cause advanced by Arpaio and the Latino-led resistance that rose up against it.
The story follows Arpaio, his supporters, and his adversaries, including Lydia Guzman, who gathered evidence for a racial-profiling lawsuit that took surprising turns. Guzman joined a coalition determined to stop Arpaio, reform unconstitutional policing, and fight for Latino civil rights. Driving While Brown details Arpaio's transformation—from "America’s Toughest Sheriff," who forced inmates to wear pink underwear, into the nation’s most feared immigration enforcer who ended up receiving President Donald Trump’s first pardon. The authors immerse readers in the lives of people on both sides of the battle and uncover the deep roots of the Trump administration's immigration policies.
The result of tireless investigative reporting, this powerful book provides critical insights into effective resistance to institutionalized racism and the community organizing that helped transform Arizona from a conservative stronghold into a battleground state.
Terry Greene Sterling is affiliated faculty and writer-in-residence at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. She is the author of Illegal. Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, the Rolling Stone, Newsweek, the Atlantic, Slate, the Daily Beast, the Village Voice, High Country News, the Guardian, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, and other publications. Greene Sterling is Editor-at-Large for the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.
Jude Joffe-Block joined the Associated Press as a reporter and editor in 2020. Before that, she reported on immigration for more than a decade for outlets that include NPR, the Guardian, The World and Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. She was a visiting journalist at the Russell Sage Foundation and a fellow with New America, the Center for the Future of Arizona, and the Logan Nonfiction Program while coauthoring this book. She began her journalism career in Mexico.
"Long before Donald J. Trump, there was Joe Arpaio, the Bull Connor-esque sheriff notorious for his mistreatment of immigrants and Latinos in Arizona's largest county. But the authors of Driving While Brown have masterfully documented the previously unknown story of the Latino activists who organized to bring him down and help turn Arizona into a new battleground state. Investigative journalism, storytelling, at its best."—Alfredo Corchado, author of Midnight in Mexico and Homelands
"Arpaio is, if it’s possible, even Trumpier than Trump. This splendid book is a lively portrait of a demagogic anti-immigration crusader and the people who helped bring him down. But the authors have nonetheless let Arpaio’s own voice be heard, and they have listened carefully to people on both sides of the immigration debate that seems certain to rage for decades to come."—Adam Hochschild, author of Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays
"Driving While Brown reads like a novel and is at once a rich, intimate portrayal of the excesses of immigration enforcement in one locality in the country as well as an analysis of the forces and power dynamics that make these repressive practices possible in the rest of the country."—Cecilia Menjívar, Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, and President, American Sociological Association, 2021–22
"This is combustible nonfiction: an irresistible subject, a white sheriff so consumed by the perceived threat of brown immigrants that he'll defy the federal judiciary. Add two of the best reporters in the Southwest—really, anywhere—and you get a searing, decades-long portrait of racism in America and the criminal justice system that has perpetuated it, and the deconstruction of an ignorant and self-absorbed elected official who is very much like the president who pardoned him. To read this book is to understand America in the twenty-first century."—Walter V. Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winner, leader of the Boston Globe's Spotlight Team that inspired the Academy Award–winning film Spotlight
"Driving While Brown is an engaging chronicle of hate disguised as populism, from its short shelf life to how it inspired courageous activists to stand up, push back, and launch a movement that’s remaking our political landscape."—Ricardo Sandoval-Palos, PBS Public Editor and coauthor of The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement
"In Driving While Brown, Greene Sterling and Joffe-Block expertly fill in the blanks and connect the dots to build a compelling, comprehensive narrative of the immigration battles that have defined and redefined Arizona, offering a window into the ethnic and racial animus in the United States today and the transformative power of hope and purpose shared by younger generations. This is a book for our times."—Fernanda Santos, author of The Fire Line: The Story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots and former Phoenix bureau chief for the New York Times