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When my AF dad got transferred from TX to Tucson,AZ back in '62 we saw Phoenix and thought it was ugly as hell and flat as a tortilla,but as soon as we arrived in beautiful Tucson surrounded by mountains,and with so much beautiful Spanish architecture I was in love!
The 2 yrs. we lived there,I totally loved it,and it and the Cotswolds of England,and Cheyenne,WY, are my three favorite places that my dad was stationed in his 26 yrs.military career.
I would pick Tucson a thousand times over Phoenix,in fact no way on earth would I even consider the ugly and INSANELY HOT/DRY Phoenix!
Uh; you pretty much described Tucson in 2014, not Phoenix.
When my AF dad got transferred from TX to Tucson,AZ back in '62 we saw Phoenix and thought it was ugly as hell and flat as a tortilla,but as soon as we arrived in beautiful Tucson surrounded by mountains,and with so much beautiful Spanish architecture I was in love!
The 2 yrs. we lived there,I totally loved it,and it and the Cotswolds of England,and Cheyenne,WY, are my three favorite places that my dad was stationed in his 26 yrs.military career.
I would pick Tucson a thousand times over Phoenix,in fact no way on earth would I even consider the ugly and INSANELY HOT/DRY Phoenix!
... I agree with everything the previous posters have said except I do not consider Arizona diverse. There are Mexicans and Native Americans but being from the Midwest I miss the ethnic Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Where are the Russian, Polish, Croatian, Slovak, Hungarian, Ukrainian, etc churches and their weekly food sales and annual festivals? When I hear a foreign language it is always Spanish. It takes more than 4 or 5 different colors to be diverse. You have to have all of the sub groups of each color. Too many plain vanilla white people in my opinion. Haven't seen an Asian in weeks. Saw a black guy last week. Met an old Italian woman that speaks broken and it made me homesick, and I'm not even Italian.
Well, we are supposed to be reviving threads ...
It's hardly Arizona's fault that there aren't a huge number of Eastern Europeans in this state. New immigrants from those areas tend to go places where people of their own ethnicity came before them. Which is hardly Arizona since it wasn't even a state when that particular flood of immigrants arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Not to mention, ALL immigrants assimilate in roughly two generations, so it's hard to even know what many people's ethnicity is. So it's rarely any doing of theirs if they seem "plain vanilla." My maternal grandparents came to this country from Hungary and Slovakia and even their children, including my mother, never learned more than about 10 words of either of those languages. So how would I have learned?
Before I moved to Arizona, I lived in Pittsburgh in what is known as an ethnic neighborhood. There was a Catholic school at the end of the dead end street where my house was located (we didn't call them cul de sacs in Pittsburgh). The school was built in the early 20th century by Roman Catholics who had come from Croatia and in their church a block away, Mass was said in Croatian. By the time I moved to the neighborhood in the 1980s, the school had been turned into fashionable loft condominiums. Mass was still said in the church, but only in English, and the parishioners raised money with bingo games not bake sales or other ethic activities. These days there is only one church left in all of Pittsburgh's historic South Side that raises money selling pierógi.
Tucson would probably look no more "ethnic" to you than Phoenix is, although I assure you many ethnicities, nationalities, and religions are represented here. In the small housing development where I live in northwest Pima County, we have white, black, Asian, and Latino families living here in the look-alike houses. One of my close neighbors has a child adopted from Russia and the couple across the street are immigrants from Mexico, although you would never know it to meet their young children who speak completely unaccented English and adore Spiderman and Katy Perry.
When I look out my bedroom window, I have a beautiful view of Pusch Ridge, part of the Santa Catalina Mountain Range. Why is it called Pusch Ridge? Because it's named after George Pusch, an immigrant from Germany moved here in the 1870s and built Steam Pump Ranch at the base of the Ridge. I seriously doubt, however, that anyone would recognize his descendants as German, even though they are.
If you miss ethnicity, you might want to come down to Tucson this very weekend as this is the date of our annual festival Tucson Meet Yourself. This is a three-day celebration of the estimated 60 cultures that make up the city. Annually about 100,000 people attend to enjoy delicacies from the authentic ethnic food booths and to see the performers and artists representing their cultures — Latino, European, Asian, African, and many Arizona and New Mexico tribes. There are a lot of Greeks and Jews in Tucson. I also have met Laotians, Hmongs, Iraquis, Iranians, Syrians, and Sudanese. We have a community of Tibetan Buddhists, my bank is next door to a Korean church, and I worked for a few years at American Home Furnishings, which was founded by a pair of cousins from Hungary.
I find it hard to believe that all those things couldn't be found in Phoenix, too, although they are probably hidden among all those Poles and Lithuanians who moved to the Valley of the Sun via Chicago and all the Norwegians and Swedes who arrived with a generational stop in Minnesota or Wisconsin. You might want to check out the Chinese Cultural Center on N. 44th Street; the Jewish Heritage Center at 122 E. Culver Street built in 1921 and on the National Register of Historic Places; the Arizona Lao Center on S. 46th Street; the African-American Multicultural Museum, 617 N. Scottsdale Road; the Islamic Community Center in Tempe; the Irish Cultural Center on N. Central Avenue, the Arizona Russian Festival is sponsored by the Holy Archangels Orthodox Church in Ahwautukee, and the Japanese Culture Club holds activities all over the valley.
You already missed this year's Phoenix Polish Festival. The next one is April 18-19, 2015, near the Greenway Road exit on I-17. But you haven't missed the Greater Phoenix Greek Festival THIS WEEKEND, Oct. 10-12 at 1973 E. Maryland Avenue. There's another one in Chandler, too.
You also might be happy to know that ASU is the home of The Melikian Center, dedicated to intensive training in the less commonly taughtEastern European and Eurasian languages. ASU is also home to the School of International Letters and Cultures, which hosts and International Artists Lecture Series, in its third year: https://silc.asu.edu/news/internatio...hird-year-line
It's virtually impossible to believe that an American city as big as the Phoenix Metro isn't going to represent a LOT of ethnicities among its more than 4 million residents. There's even a Meetup group called "Culture Arizona," dedicated to an exploration of various cultures. CulturalAZ (Phoenix, AZ) - Meetup
Last edited by Jukesgrrl; 10-10-2014 at 11:27 PM..
It's hardly Arizona's fault that there aren't a huge number of Eastern Europeans in this state. New immigrants from those areas tend to go places where people of their own ethnicity came before them. Which is hardly Arizona since it wasn't even a state when that particular flood of immigrants arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Not to mention, ALL immigrants assimilate in roughly two generations, so it's hard to even know what many people's ethnicity is. So it's rarely any doing of theirs if they seem "plain vanilla." My maternal grandparents came to this country from Hungary and Slovakia and even their children, including my mother, never learned more than about 10 words of either of those languages. So how would I have learned?
Before I moved to Arizona, I lived in Pittsburgh in what is known as an ethnic neighborhood. There was a Catholic school at the end of the dead end street where my house was located (we didn't call them cul de sacs in Pittsburgh). The school was built in the early 20th century by Roman Catholics who had come from Croatia and in their church a block away, Mass was said in Croatian. By the time I moved to the neighborhood in the 1980s, the school had been turned into fashionable loft condominiums. Mass was still said in the church, but only in English, and the parishioners raised money with bingo games not bake sales or other ethic activities. These days there is only one church left in all of Pittsburgh's historic South Side that raises money selling pierógi.
Tucson would probably look no more "ethnic" to you than Phoenix is, although I assure you many ethnicities, nationalities, and religions are represented here. In the small housing development where I live in northwest Pima County, we have white, black, Asian, and Latino families living here in the look-alike houses. One of my close neighbors has a child adopted from Russia and the couple across the street are immigrants from Mexico, although you would never know it to meet their young children who speak completely unaccented English and adore Spiderman and Katy Perry.
When I look out my bedroom window, I have a beautiful view of Pusch Ridge, part of the Santa Catalina Mountain Range. Why is it called Pusch Ridge? Because it's named after George Pusch, an immigrant from Germany moved here in the 1870s and built Steam Pump Ranch at the base of the Ridge. I seriously doubt, however, that anyone would recognize his descendants as German, even though they are.
If you miss ethnicity, you might want to come down to Tucson this very weekend as this is the date of our annual festival Tucson Meet Yourself. This is a three-day celebration of the estimated 60 cultures that make up the city. Annually about 100,000 people attend to enjoy delicacies from the authentic ethnic food booths and to see the performers and artists representing their cultures — Latino, European, Asian, African, and many Arizona and New Mexico tribes. There are a lot of Greeks and Jews in Tucson. I also have met Laotians, Hmongs, Iraquis, Iranians, Syrians, and Sudanese. We have a community of Tibetan Buddhists, my bank is next door to a Korean church, and I worked for a few years at American Home Furnishings, which was founded by a pair of cousins from Hungary.
I find it hard to believe that all those things couldn't be found in Phoenix, too, although they are probably hidden among all those Poles and Lithuanians who moved to the Valley of the Sun via Chicago and all the Norwegians and Swedes who arrived with a generational stop in Minnesota or Wisconsin. You might want to check out the Chinese Cultural Center on N. 44th Street; the Jewish Heritage Center at 122 E. Culver Street built in 1921 and on the National Register of Historic Places; the Arizona Lao Center on S. 46th Street; the African-American Multicultural Museum, 617 N. Scottsdale Road; the Islamic Community Center in Tempe; the Irish Cultural Center on N. Central Avenue, the Arizona Russian Festival is sponsored by the Holy Archangels Orthodox Church in Ahwautukee, and the Japanese Culture Club holds activities all over the valley.
You already missed this year's Phoenix Polish Festival. The next one is April 18-19, 2015, near the Greenway Road exit on I-17. But you haven't missed the Greater Phoenix Greek Festival THIS WEEKEND, Oct. 10-12 at 1973 E. Maryland Avenue. There's another one in Chandler, too.
You also might be happy to know that ASU is the home of The Melikian Center, dedicated to intensive training in the less commonly taughtEastern European and Eurasian languages. ASU is also home to the School of International Letters and Cultures, which hosts and International Artists Lecture Series, in its third year: https://silc.asu.edu/news/internatio...hird-year-line
It's virtually impossible to believe that an American city as big as the Phoenix Metro isn't going to represent a LOT of ethnicities among its more than 4 million residents. There's even a Meetup group called "Culture Arizona," dedicated to an exploration of various cultures. CulturalAZ (Phoenix, AZ) - Meetup
Uh; I'm 100 percent sure there are lots of people of Eastern European family here but; many of them had their names changed a few generations back and, in 2014 are part of the "anglo white" world here in Arizona. Too, huge numbers of them "married out" with people of Western European family back in the day.
There are lots of Romanians here.
Having lived here for 14 years, I hate it now. But I think it's due to my mild thermophobia, I hate the heat, I am miserable here...... would rather move to Canada LOL
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