The Show for June 16, 2026: Replacing a Cesar Chavez statue, AI for kids' mental health and more

An 8-foot-tall statue of Cesar Chavez has been taken down in Phoenix following allegations of his sexual misconduct. We’ll hear what one Arizona artist wants to put in its place. Plus, how safe are AI chatbots for adolescents looking for mental health guidance?

Transcript

UNDERWRITER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than 1.1 billion dollars in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona. bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

LAUREN GILGER: Hi, I’m Lauren Gilger, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Mark Brodie.

GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, how effective and safe are AI chatbots that aim to help with mental health?

BRODIE: And the real Wild West in territorial Arizona and the nation’s first opioid crisis.

GILGER: But first this morning, the year-long battle between the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Recorder Justin Heap keeps heating up. Now they’re trading barbs in court, and the county attorney has stepped in, arguing a Trump-aligned legal organization that represents Recorder Justin Heap is exerting too much influence over his office.

And on top of that, a special prosecutor has been brought in to investigate allegations that some of Heap’s employees illegally removed a ballot scanner and provisional ballots during a recent local election.

KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky has been covering every twist and turn of this ongoing saga and he joins us now to tell us all about it. Good morning, Wayne.

WAYNE SCHUTSKY: Good morning.

GILGER: Okay, so where do we even begin here? Let’s start with this special prosecutor, the removal of this ballot scanner. There’s surveillance video of this I’ve seen, right? Like the the big machine being wheeled out of the building into a van.

SCHUTSKY: Yeah, so this is like a a scanner, a pre-tabulation scanner that scans in different types of mail ballots. And essentially, yeah, we’ve we’ve got the recorder’s top information technology employee and an unknown other employee whose face was blurred, taking it out of MTEC, which is like the central tabulating facility. This happened during tabulation, during the Tempe jurisdictional elections. No evidence at this point that it affected the election in any way, but also beyond that machine, also taking a handful of like ballot affidavit envelopes.

So, yeah. So as you said, a special prosecutor, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell kind of conflicted herself out because she’s technically the attorney for both of these sides, which we’ll get into later. And so she appointed a special prosecutor, former Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer to just basically figure out if anything illegal happened. An HR investigation already determined that something improper happened, but they want to determine whether any crimes were actually committed.

GILGER: Okay, okay. What has Heap said about this? I mean, he was mad that that there were it was a it was a Pinal County Sheriff’s officer off duty knocking on one of their doors?

SCHUTSKY: Yeah, he showed up at the at that top information officer and just like to let him know he’s under investigation. I don’t know exactly what occurred in there, but yeah, that that set the recorder’s office off saying that the board of supervisors is sicking law enforcement on us now.

What actually happened is that we found is this outside special prosecutor was appointed to avoid a conflict of interest, just to determine whether any crime occurred and he retained an off-duty sheriff’s deputy from Pinal County to help with that investigation. He said that this Heap believes the scanner belongs to the recorder’s office, so nothing improper happened. But again, we that’s another dispute in this long line of disputes between the recorder and the board. The board has shown documentation showing that this belongs to the elections department, which is under the board’s control.

GILGER: Okay. So let’s go on to some of those other ongoing disputes. We have Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell stepping in here. Her office was in court arguing that the attorney that is representing Heap, because she is conflicted out on this one, has, you know, maybe been too partisan?

SCHUTSKY: Yeah, so this all goes back to this ongoing legal fight between Heap and the board that’s been going on since Heap took office and the new board took office, where they’re they’re both arguing like control of different election activities, who controls what, big disagreement over that. And then Heap also alleged that, you know, that his information technology staff was taken away from him, which, you know, a judge affirmed.

Anyway, Heap brought in his own attorney in this case, which is American First Legal, which is a Trump-aligned law firm founded by Trump advisor Stephen Miller. And Mitchell has already argued in court that he can’t do that, that only her office can appoint these attorneys. Now, she lost that case. A judge said, "No, the recorder’s an elected official, there’s nothing in state law that says only the county attorney can do this. So Heap, you can keep your attorney."

However, now the county attorney is arguing that they’re overstepping the bounds of that order and he’s basically acting as the recorder’s election advisor in all capacities, not just related to the case. County attorney says, "Wait a second, that’s not what the judge ordered, and that’s my job." So, and she says, "You know, it’s either me, or if I have a conflict, I can appoint someone else, but um and I would never appoint this guy, basically, because they’re saying, you know, it’s a partisan group, that’s not the type of attorneys we want advising the recorder on election issues."

GILGER: And we’re heading into an election, you know, let’s not forget, pretty quickly here.

SCHUTSKY: Yeah, yeah, next week. We’ve got early ballots going out.

GILGER: Right. So all of this kind of heating up right now. Let’s talk about what happened in court this week as well, Wayne. I mean, they were there yesterday. You watched the whole thing. There were some pretty serious allegations being thrown about. We even heard the attorney for the board, Cory Langhofer, accusing Heap’s team of lying to a judge. Let’s take a listen to what he had to say.

CORY LANGHOFER: I’ve literally never been involved in a case where misstatements to the court were as pervasive as they are here. Even in the last five minutes, I’ve lost count of the number of false statements that you have heard.

GILGER: Sounds like a lot of back and forth.

SCHUTSKY: Yeah, so as I mentioned, this is all that case where a judge actually ordered that the board illegally removed Heap’s IT staff and access to IT resources when they kind of consolidated it all under the board’s supervision. Ordered them to give it back and Heap’s attorney has said they haven’t done that, and they’re not complying with other parts of the order, saying like, you know, Heap controls early voting, for instance, and they’re saying he hasn’t they haven’t given him all those responsibilities.

What Langhofer is saying is a lot of the claims they’re making are untrue. He points out that the board has funded eight new IT positions for Heap’s office and that Heap just hasn’t hired them. You know, pointing other claims that, you know, we’re trying to talk to the recorder, but um, you know, refusing to meet.

Now, on the other side of this, Heap’s attorney is saying, "No, every time you guys have him in an open meeting, you just grandstand and yell at him, and so we are not going to participate in that again." So, it’s just, you know, these back and forth, they’re both saying they’re lying, and it’s really difficult without, you know, with all these back room conversations and things to determine what the truth is.

GILGER: Okay. Tell us about the judge in this case and what he has ordered so far. It sounds like they may be agreeing to go into mediation and kind of take this out of court altogether?

SCHUTSKY: Yeah, despite all these agreements, it disagreements, it seems like maybe we might be getting to a point where we get a a mediator in the middle of this who could actually maybe tell us what the truth of the matter is and what everyone’s agreeing to.

After all those disagreements, Langhofer kind of floated the idea of, "Well, let’s just do an on-camera meeting and then, you know, everyone will know what was said." Now again, the grandstanding issue came up, and so Heap’s attorney said, "What about a mediator?" which has been brought up before, and the judge previously declined, but now he seems to be thinking that might be the best option.

So he hasn’t quite ordered it yet, but he indicated he is supportive of that, and they kind of discussed, you know, here’s a judge or an ex-judge or retired judge who we might be able to pick to to sit down, someone trustworthy who can actually actually do the job.

GILGER: Real quick, Wayne, timeline on that given early ballots going out very soon?

SCHUTSKY: Oh goodness, the judge did indicate it has to happen quickly, and so they have to find a mediator who can kind of sit down immediately. If it doesn’t happen, there are further hearings in these disputes scheduled for the end of the month, which is after early ballots already went out, so.

GILGER: Okay, here we go. KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky with our politics desk. Wayne, thank you for your all of your reporting on this, appreciate it.

SCHUTSKY: Yeah, thank you.

BRODIE: Kids are increasingly turning to AI for mental health advice. A study from last fall put the number at about 1 in 8 adolescents who said they’d look to AI chatbots for mental health guidance. Two-thirds of them said they did so at least monthly. Common Sense Media has launched a new lab focused on AI safety for children, including a report that looked at how safe a number of platforms are for kids.

My next guest says millions of kids are using these apps. Some are marketed directly to users, while others are run through school counselors.

Dr. Darja Djordjevic is a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist. She’s also a faculty fellow in Brainstorm, the Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, and a senior scientific advisor on AI to Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute. She joins me, and Darja, what did you find are some of the differences in how these different kinds of programs operate?

DR. DARJA DJORDJEVIC: So, yeah, there there are differences, right? In one case, there’s no human oversight of the interaction between the therapy chatbot and the user, and in the other one there is, and there’s an understanding or a disclaimer from the beginning that the transcripts can be viewed by the school staff members. But for both these approaches, a major issue is that the evidence base is still quite thin and contested, and probably ... weakest for the users who are most likely to rely on these products.

MARK BRODIE: So, obviously, you know, we’ve been seeing a lot of research coming out about how not just kids, but adults also can be sometimes forgetting that like if they’re communicating with AI, they’re not communicating with a human, they’re communicating with technology. Are there dangers associated with doing that when it comes to a child’s mental health?

DR. DARJA DJORDJEVIC: Yes, there are dangers. Let me outline some of the dangers, right? So the AI therapy market right now is relatively unaccountable. There are no licensing requirements, there’s no malpractice liability and there’s no minimum safety standards for these apps, right? That are put, that are out there on the market.

And so basically any company can describe its product as therapy, as evidence-based care, or clinical support, with no regulatory consequence. Which is very different from, you know, the the responsibility and the ethical commitment and the liability that human practitioners face and ... the standards to which they’re held.

And also, what we’ve seen in our testing is that an app can really miss a teen’s suicidal crisis, it can validate a child’s romantic attachment to AI, or it can even engage with psychotic content as a personality quirk with no — with basically no professional consequences and no recourse for users.

And honestly, no mechanism to surface the failure publicly. And whereas a licensed human therapist who harms a patient faces all of those consequences. So, we’re quite concerned about that that disjuncture.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it sounds like what you’re saying is that if a child is going to be using AI, especially to deal with mental health or talk about what’s going on with them, that there has to be a human connected to it in some way.

DR. DARJA DJORDJEVIC: I, yes, in some way, ideally, yes. That is definitely, I would ... that is what we would strongly recommend at this stage.

MARK BRODIE: So, I’m curious given especially sort of the availability of mental health for kids, both in terms of like the number of actual therapists and counselors who are out there, and also, you know, the affordability. You know, a lot of therapists don’t accept insurance, that might there might be an issue of of students not or children not being able to afford it or their families.

Like what do you think the the possibilities are for AI to be able to maybe actually help kids who can’t, for whatever reason, see a therapist, see a human?

DR. DARJA DJORDJEVIC: Wonderful question. I think there’s great potential for AI to help us build systems where we can address the equity gap in access to mental health care for young people and for adults as well.

But I think we have to be very careful about the fact that we’re still in the early days of the the development of these platforms and the development of AI for mental health support. And like everything in medicine and psychiatry, we want to have a strong evidence base supporting what we do clinically.

And so, I want to make first a call to action for more research in this area. Because we don’t want to fall into the trap of ending up with a two-tiered system where we have low, much lower quality um AI-supported mental health care for the people who can’t afford the sort of standard of care, and then we have that standard of care, higher quality care for people who can afford it.

So, I worry about thinking about this as an easy quick solution to the mental health crisis and the equity gap as dangerous because it might reinforce inequality.

MARK BRODIE: Right, because I imagine that what you’re hoping for is like in a worst-case scenario, the AI maybe doesn’t help the child as much as it could, as opposed to the worst-case scenario being the child harms themselves in some way because like that’s what AI encouraged them to do.

DR. DARJA DJORDJEVIC: Right. Yeah, major, major safety concerns. And again, as I mentioned, no regulatory environment, no Hippocratic Oath, no ethical kind of framework to hold, you know, AI companies or platforms accountable in the way that clinicians are accountable.

MARK BRODIE: Do you get the sense that for the platforms that are maybe linked to schools or to a therapist that they are thinking about these kinds of things and really trying to make sure that that their products, you know, do no harm? And if nothing else, like don’t make matters worse.

DR. DARJA DJORDJEVIC: Yes, I think we have some evidence from our testing that they are, that these companies are thinking carefully about these matters in in many cases. Sonar and AlongSide, right, which were two platforms that are both deployed through schools within existing care infrastructure, they earned meaningfully lower risk ratings in our assessment. Not because the underlying technology is better, but because they made fundamentally different and better choices about how they make use of people and professional care systems in a mental health context.

And when we simulated crises in both of those products, Sonar and AlongSide, a real person called the test account’s guardian and notified the school. And in the most serious simulation, initiated mandated reporting within 15 minutes of the first disclosure. ... And that’s the kind of outcome that we’d like to see across the board, that that ... t kind of outcome become embodied in a standard that every product in this space should be held to.

MARK BRODIE: So, I guess then would it be your hope that at some point there are some number of platforms out there that you feel comfortable recommending or at least saying, "This one’s OK to use," and really just try to push as many clinicians and counselors and schools and families and their children to those platforms, as opposed to sort of the Wild West of, you know, look in the app store and see whatever mental health AI app is out there?

DR. DARJA DJORDJEVIC: Exactly. Exactly. I would want to have a a well-thought-out sort of short list of products that have measured up against standards and regulatory procedures, yes.

MARK BRODIE: What is your level of optimism that you’ll be able to do that?

DR. DARJA DJORDJEVIC: Well, I think that on the horizon, we are going to see different entities put out youth and general AI safety rating, AI safety standards, excuse me. I think in terms of the regulatory environment, we’re going to see much of the initial progress sort of happen at the state level rather than the federal level. And I think there is some hope there just in terms of how different states have pursued legislation with respect to technology and kid safety, whether it’s social media or AI most recently.

But I am concerned about the broader picture of a national regulatory framework. I think that’s a big ask and a big endeavor, and I’m, I’m not sure that we have the, you know, the political will to achieve that in the near term.

MARK BRODIE: Dr. Darja Djordjevic is a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist. She’s also a faculty fellow in Brainstorm, the Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, and a senior scientific advisor on AI to Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute.

GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, when an ASU professor went looking through state archives, he stumbled upon a photo unlike the other inmates of Yuma Territorial Prison in the 1800s.

EDUARDO OBREGÓN PAGÁN: Then I turned the page, and there is this pretty young woman there, who had this look of shock. She she had what I characterize as that kind of thousand-yard stare.

BRODIE: We’ll hear more from the professor who wrote a book following the girl’s tumultuous life in the true Wild West.

GILGER: But first, tributes to the late civil rights leader Cesar Chavez have been taken down all over the country in the wake of allegations that he sexually abused underage girls for years. And one of those was a statue that sat in Cesar Chavez Park in Phoenix for 30 years. It was made by longtime Phoenix Chicano artist, mask maker, and sculptor Zarco Guerrero, who told me he was there when the city officials took it down.

It was a tough moment for the activist and artist, who has mixed feelings about the whole scandal. He came into our studios recently and told me how much Chavez has impacted his life since he was a high school student in Mesa decades ago.

ZARCO GUERRERO: When I was in high school, I really wasn’t politically conscientious, you know what I mean? I was involved in sports and school activities, you know how teenagers are.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.

GUERRERO: But when Cesar Chavez came on the scene and we saw him on television, it was the the first example of what we’d call a positive role model. Every single Mexican American, Chicano, or Native American was portrayed as a drug dealer, a pimp, a gardener, an illegal, you know, everything negative.

GILGER: Yeah.

GUERRERO: And we lived with that. We grew up with that. We just thought that’s, that’s how the world was. And when we saw Cesar Chavez, we saw this short, dark-complexioned, very Indigenous-looking man from Arizona, of Yaqui heritage, who was eloquent in both English and Spanish, and it seemed like everything that came out of his mouth made sense.

And myself and my friends immediately started, you know, talking about this guy, Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers. And we started educating ourselves and following the farmworkers’ movement.

And then I think it was in 1968 when he was on his fast, and they brought him to Phoenix, and I saw him, the first time we saw him was on a stretcher as they brought him out from, I think, the the Santa Rita Center.

GILGER: Wow. And you went down there?

GUERRERO: And we went down there, that greatly influenced us and inspired us that, man, this guy’s making a tremendous sacrifice to bring attention to this issue.

GILGER: So it sounds like he, in particular, really influenced you, really changed the way you saw the world and and your role in it as a very young person.

GUERRERO: Exactly. And then later on, you know, we became involved with the movement at that time, painting signs, boycotting grocery stores, you know, promoting the grape strike and things like that. We became as involved as we could.

Later on, a few years later, he came to Phoenix to give a talk, and myself and a couple of artists, we managed to get his attention and say, "Hey, we’re, you know, we’re aspiring artists and and we want to serve the movement. What what can we do to serve the movement?"

GILGER: "What can we do?"

GUERRERO: And he came out right away. He said, he said, "we have a great legacy in painting murals. Go out in the community and paint murals with positive images about the community, about staying in school, practicing nonviolence, saying no to drugs. We have a great legacy of poetry. Write poems, share your poetry with the community. Write music, write songs, do theater, create our own media to promote the cause."

And that’s exactly what we did. And that became the voice, the essence, the narrative of what later came to be known as the Chicano art movement.

GILGER: Right, which you have been a part of your entire career?

GUERRERO: My entire life.

GILGER: Wow, so this was like directed to you by Cesar Chavez himself. Wow. I mean, so it sounds like he meant a lot in your life and has for a very long time.

Thirty years ago, which was, you know, some time after your career had begun and and you’d been doing this work, you were commissioned by the city to make this sculpture of Cesar Chavez at the park, right? What did you think at the time? What did you want it to say?

GUERRERO: Well, when that happened and I was asked to do that, of course, we competed for the for the commission. And we got it because we had been involved with Cesar for, you know, for many years. We were committed to the cause, everybody knew that.

And so I was extremely excited. It was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me to honor the movement with Cesar Chavez as the iconic symbol of the movement.

GILGER: Yeah.

GUERRERO: So yeah, I put everything I had into it and thought, man, this is the greatest thing that could happen to me.

GILGER: So, your work is often very abstract or like brightly colored, it’s inspired often by, you know, these indigenous themes, the Chicano roots, like that’s what I think of when I think of of of Zarco Guerrero and his work, right?

But this statue is is very realistic, and it’s just him standing there, right? Like looking ahead. Why did you make it the way you made it?

GUERRERO: Well, you know, there was a lot of ways that we could have depicted him, but I wanted to depict him moving. I wanted to make him larger than life, so I made him 8 foot tall.

GILGER: Right, he’s big, yeah.

GUERRERO: Yeah, he’s big, and I tried to make it as realistic as possible. The family, the Cesar Chavez family, came down a few times to visit while I was doing the sculpture, so they were very involved. The farmworkers’ movement at that time, the Cesar Chavez Foundation, they all had a hand in it, and they all had something to say about it.

So this was about expressing him and the whole idea of the movement. So I incorporated all of that into the concept of what it was going to look like.

GILGER: Yeah, so a lot lots of input, it sounds like.

GUERRERO: Yeah.

GILGER: OK, so then, you know, fast forward to this year and these allegations are published in the New York Times, and everything changes. What was your response? This was a day after you had been performing a tribute to him.

GUERRERO: Exactly. And you know, all my life, every time I did a performance and introduced myself, I always mentioned Cesar Chavez as as one of my main influences. Up until that day of the the article in the New York Times came out.

But when we installed the sculpture, I had a premonition or a fear, I don’t know what to call it, that someday that sculpture was going to be taken down. And when it finally happened, I said, "Well, I knew it was going to happen eventually."

Especially when they started taking down Confederate monuments and stuff like that, I thought, well, we either leave up everybody’s monuments or we take down everybody’s monuments, right? I mean, come on, that’s fair.

But what didn’t seem fair about this, how from one day to the next, these allegations went out, and before we knew it, we were condemning Cesar Chavez, and we were erasing him from history.

All the wonderful things that that were accomplished by the movement seemed to be part of the process to dismiss all of that, to discredit the union, to humiliate us, to disempower us, and to divide us as a community.

GILGER: Do you doubt the allegations these women have brought forward, including Dolores Huerta?

GUERRERO: I’ve met and been with Dolores Huerta on many occasions, and I’ve visited the family. I went to where they live, the compound. Not that I don’t believe it, OK, I believe it. I believe the the victims, and perhaps it’s true, I have to accept that.

The timing, and the way that we turned against each other, so, you know, we’re still dealing with with all these issues. And that’s why I feel we have to talk about it.

GILGER: So, you requested that the statue be covered up, fenced off, but you don’t know what’s going to happen to it yet?

GUERRERO: Well, I’m very grateful to the city of Phoenix. They contacted me right away and asked my opinion. And that’s when I said, "Please cover it up." And they did that. They covered it up right away, and they also had me involved and wanted me to be there when the statue was taken down.

And they’re going to put it in storage. They asked me what I would like to do, and I said, "I would love to create another piece dedicated to the farmworkers."

GILGER: OK, so you do have plans for what you would like to see happen?

GUERRERO: Yes, and they’re considering that, so I’m grateful for that, yes.

GILGER: So I want to ask you about what you’re getting at there, which is maybe not, you know, a litigation of what happened, but the erasure of this history. Do you think, you know, you can at the same time recognize great wrong that this figure may have done and still respect the movement he created? Like, can you separate Cesar Chavez from the farmworker movement?

GUERRERO: Well, yes, we definitely can do that. He was the symbol, the image, the icon. But it wasn’t only him. He was a small part. He was like maybe 1% of the whole movement. Let’s move on. Let’s continue to promote and expound on all the positive aspects of the movement because they’re very, very important and they’re under a threat. So yes, I’m going to continue to promote la causa, the cause, and continue to fight for the for the working-class people of this country and to do it through nonviolence.

GILGER: OK, we’ll leave it there. Zarco Guerrero, a longtime Arizona sculptor, mask maker, and performance artist joining us to talk about the future of his Cesar Chavez statue. Zarco, thank you so much for coming in. I appreciate it.

GUERRERO: Thank you so much for having me.

BRODIE: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: One of the most celebrated artists of the 20th and 21st centuries passed away last week. David Hockney was 88. While he was best known for his bright paintings depicting life in Southern California and gay culture, there are other works in Hockney’s collection, including those on display in a 2019 show at the Heard Museum here.

The exhibit was called "David Hockney’s Yosemite and Masters of California Basketry." It included a series of drawings Hockney made on an iPad during visits to Yosemite National Park, as well as some of his photo collages of the park. The exhibit also featured baskets made by Indigenous artists living in and around Yosemite Valley.

I spoke in 2019 with Ann Marshall, director of research at the Heard Museum, and Erin Joyce, who was then the museum’s fine arts curator. I started the conversation by asking Joyce what the thinking was behind this exhibit in terms of combining these different artists and art forms.

ERIN JOYCE: Well, I think part of the impetus for this exhibition stems from our mission, which is looking at the intersectionality between Indigenous cultures of the Western hemisphere and broader cultural and artistic themes. So, we were thinking about, you know, what are those connection points with a place like Yosemite? And I think this exhibition really emanated out of place and how place has an impactfulness on either a culture or a person to create art. But we thought it would be a really interesting juxtaposition to look at how place and material manifested in these baskets, and then how such a celebrated and well-known artist like David Hockney was also inspired by Yosemite.

MARK BRODIE: When you look at the drawings from David Hockney, it’s very visual. You can sort of see its Yosemite. When you look at the baskets, are you looking more at the materials that they’re made of? I mean, is it — it seems to an outsider at least less obvious that these are from that part of the world.

ANN MARSHALL: Yes, I think knowing the life histories of the weavers and how Yosemite was an integral part of their lives, their home, and I think that is one of the stories that we try to tell in the exhibit.

MARK BRODIE: I’m curious about the juxtaposition, Erin, you talked about the juxtaposition of sort of the these various materials and the various pieces. You have some things that are fairly old, with things that are also very, very new here.

ERIN JOYCE: Yeah, so there is about a 100-year gap between the baskets that were produced by these Indigenous women during the Yosemite Indian Field Days and, you know, 1982 when David Hockney first went to Yosemite and started capturing it through different mechanized and digital technologies. And I think that technology is another big theme in this exhibition. It’s looking at how different artists instrumentalize different tools to create a work of art.

So you have something like these baskets, which are a very sophisticated technology that maybe grew out of a ceremonial or utilitarian use, and then in this show, they’re very much purely artistic manifestations of these artists’ creativity. And then you have David Hockney who, you know, has worked in fax machines and photocopiers and, of course, is known as an excellent draftsman and painter. But he’s experimenting with photography and with an iPad to create these monumental works of art.

So I think that’s one of the things that really — even though there is that huge span of time, not only topically are they, you know, similar in that Yosemite is drawing them together, but there’s innovation, and they’re abstracting these landscapes through very different ways.

MARK BRODIE: And when you talk about the technology of the baskets, these were in large part made during the early part of the 20th century, a lot of them from the ’30s or so. Were things changing in terms of how the women were making these baskets at that time?

ANN MARSHALL: I think one of the successful parts of the story is that beginning with the Indian Field Days, these baskets became associated with a known weaver. Basketry is not a signed art form, and too many wonderful baskets we don’t know who the weaver was. So in this instance, we do know who the weavers were.

MARK BRODIE: I think for a lot of people when they think of Yosemite, they think big. Because things are big there, and when you look at a lot of these drawings, even the ones that aren’t the monumental ones, even the ones that are smaller, they still depict things that are very big. And some of these baskets are also very large, but they almost sort of — they look smaller next to the drawings on the wall. Did you consciously have to sort of put bigger ones where they maybe wouldn’t look quite so small? You didn’t want to put a smaller one next to, for example, a drawing of El Capitan?

ANN MARSHALL: I think we were interested in giving the impression of the baskets almost nestled within the valley of Yosemite. And because of the size of David Hockney’s work, and then here they are in these cases, and then the cases, of course, you can get up very close. So you can stand back and look at some of the big Hockneys and then get up very close and look at some of the baskets.

MARK BRODIE: I think there are a lot of people who sort of have an image in their mind of what Yosemite, or at least a part of Yosemite, looks like either from having been there or seeing photographs. When you look at the baskets, though, it’s a tells us a slightly different picture. It’s not necessarily something that I think a lot of people think about with Yosemite. How important a part of this story are these baskets relative to sort of what people already know about this place?

ERIN JOYCE: Oh, I think that it’s completely integral. I mean, these baskets, you know, as Ann mentioned, they were produced during the Indian Field Days. ... They were produced as artworks and I think, you know, also the fact that we know who these weavers are, we know their biographies to a certain extent, and we’re making visibility happen.

I think a lot of people don’t have a very good understanding of Indigenous North America or those cultures, or if they do, it’s maybe a more stereotypical view. You know, so I think that that knowledge knowing the framework from where these baskets come from — and I mean these baskets not only are from Yosemite, they are Yosemite. They’re made from it.

And I think another thing that is kind of interesting about the way they play with the Hockney work is, you know, we have these, you know, formal representations of the valley. Of course, they’re abstracted through David Hockney’s lens and how he depicts artwork. But it’s the materials that these are made out of, you know. You see the landscape as depicted by Hockney, and that’s where these baskets come from.

MARK BRODIE: What do you hope that people who come to see this take away from it?

ERIN JOYCE: You know, I think it’s it’s multi-pronged. I think it’s so important for us to educate the public and show them the complex histories that inform a lot of art production. So on the Indigenous side, you know, again, sort of breaking those stereotypes and showing people the spectrum of indigeneity across the United States.

... And then also to educate the, you know, Phoenix metropolitan area about David Hockney. This is his first exhibition in the state of Arizona, you know, and he’s arguably one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th and 21st century. You know, so I think another big theme is, you know, innovation. All of the artists represented in this exhibition, whether it’s Tina Charlie or Carrie Bethel or David Hockney, have it’s sort of like you’ve been saying, "Where did that come from? Where did they get this idea?" It’s so incredibly inspired.

MARK BRODIE: Erin Joyce is the fine arts curator at the Heard Museum. I also spoke with Ann Marshall, the museum’s director of research.

They spoke about the importance of knowing the names and stories of the artists who made the baskets. That sentiment is echoed by Lucy Parker. She’s related to most of the basket weavers in the exhibit. She’s Lucy Telles’s great-granddaughter, for example. Parker still lives just outside Yosemite Valley, and when I met her outside the museum, she was surrounded by the materials to make new pieces.

LUCY PARKER: We still can make the baskets in the styles that she has done and the thing is is we run out of material because it’s not as plentiful it was when they were weaving baskets 50 years ago. There was a lot more, you know, to gather. and so those are the just the things we run into. But we still can create and do the techniques and the styles that I’ve learned that since I was very young.

MARK BRODIE: Parker says basket weaving has been in her family for generations, and that while the exhibit is humbling, it also makes her proud and honored.

LUCY PARKER: Just going in there and just seeing the generations of our family’s baskets, it’s just very heartbreaking. I mean we were just emotional and tears in our eyes that, you know, these creations of our people, you know, what they have made and it still exists. The baskets will last forever, and it’s up to us to carry that legacy on and we can do it.

BRODIE: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Mark Brodie.

GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger.

If you thought you knew what the Wild West was really like, think again. Our next guest’s new book shows just how difficult it really was. ASU history professor Eduardo Obregón Pagán just came out with “Tumbleweed Underworld: A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory,” and in it, he tells the story of Georgie Clifford, a beautiful young woman he happened to see when he was at the Arizona State Archives looking through photos of the prisoners in the notorious Yuma Territorial Prison.

EDUARDO OBREGÓN PAGÁN: Immediately he was arrested. The mother, when she found out, she got him arrested. He was arrested, he went to trial. And Minnie had to not only withstand the sexual assault, but she also had to withstand being in this room full of men, asking her very private questions.

But she was a strong young woman, he was convicted, and what I surmise at that point is the parents then, they kind of go into emergency mode. They realize, OK, everybody knows in this small town our daughter has been raped. We need to do something to make sure she marries well.

And so the dad convinces his employer, who was the most eligible bachelor in Clifton. Now, he was about 40 years old. And so they kind of work out this deal where he marries Minnie. Now, Minnie’s 13 years old and he’s 40, so just keep that — I know. Keep that age gap. Now, I should say this, it was not uncommon for men in their 30s to be marrying young girls around 16. But this age gap was really pushing the limits, as you can imagine.

My only guess is that being forced into this marriage with a man as old as her father and then to become a mother was just a very difficult fit for her. I think she just wanted to be a young girl like all her other friends. And she eventually uh left the relationship.

There were lots of men who were willing to pay her a lot of attention. Eventually, Minnie’s mother convinces her to join the Double Decker, which was the finest gentlemen’s club in Prescott. It was just right behind Whiskey Row today. And to work there as a very high-class prostitute.

And as a gentlemen’s club. They had all the wines and everything that a man would want: the finest cigars, but even opioids, right? Even morphine, cocaine, heroin, whatever it is that you wanted.

So she worked there for a couple of years. And then she gets arrested in 1893. She’s found in an opium joint, and this is the first time the name of Georgie Clifford enters into the record. And then from there, we’re able to trace her.

When she was raped at the age of 12, it was extremely common to treat what was collectively termed women’s issues with morphine. Not only morphine, but heroin and cocaine, they were used as commonly as we use ibuprofen today, or acetaminophen. She was prescribed this, and I suspect that that’s when she started down this path of addiction.

LAUREN GILGER: So, tell us more about that unrestricted opiate industry at the time, like of the Old West. I think we kind of have a sense of an opium den at the time, right? But it was, as you said, prescribed, but then criminalized later on.

PAGÁN: Yeah. I would say this is one of the the biggest finds of my research was that what most people had in their medicine chest was far more dangerous and far more deadly than any gunslinger in a Western town.

And opioids — and we’re talking now morphine, which is synthesized from opium, but also opium was available. So opium, morphine, heroin — which was synthesized from morphine — widely available, completely unrestricted. And often any of the patent medicines that you could buy to treat sore throats, hay fever, upset stomach, you name it — I kid you not, you name it — were often infused with either morphine or opium. And so, it was widely, widely used.

GILGER: So when did it turn? When did it become something that was criminalized and then obviously impacts Georgie’s life?

PAGÁN: So here’s the curious thing. The first addict of morphine was the very chemist who synthesized morphine from opium, Friedrich Sertürner. He was a German, and he became the first morphine addict that I can tell. And he began sounding the alarm that this is a very dangerous chemical, very addictive.

But people really didn’t catch on until about the 1920s, and that’s when you have this global effort to try and cut back on the trade, cut off the inflow of these drugs in the United States. And so we’re dealing with a period just about a century long, where these powerful addictive substances were freely used and completely available.

GILGER: So, you also in this book, because you’re looking at the opiate trade at the time and sort of the impact of this on Georgie’s life, but also the sex trade. Obviously, she was a prostitute, if a high-end one in Prescott at the time. But you refer to prostitution as sex trafficking, which you admit I think is sort of anachronistic. But I wonder, why did you make that choice?

PAGÁN: So, to this day, there’s this underlying assumption that women entered into the sex trade or into prostitution at will. And what I discovered in Georgie’s life was, as a matter of fact, no. She was coerced into it and kept there against her will, and opioids were actually used to keep her there.

And so prostitutes very commonly used morphine as a way of as a form of birth control. Morphine in particular is what fueled the sex trade. So this is why I use the term sex trafficking, and there was some evidence that they were actually traded.

Again, I follow Georgie’s life, and she goes from this very high-class brothel to being homeless and living underneath a train trestle in Benson. And stealing food. So she’s now homeless at this point, so this is over a decade of just her addiction and a number of things.

Nobody wants that life. And I’ve, and I, part of my research was listening to modern reformers today who work in the sex trafficking industry and and really trying to help women get out. There’s a reason why women just don’t step off when they’re abused or something goes wrong, and they just say, “OK, we’re done.”

There’s a reason why that doesn’t happen: It’s because control is a very significant part of the modern traffic. And I found those elements also in Georgie’s life, and Georgie was not unique.

GILGER: So, what’s so interesting about this character here — Georgie Clifford, who was a real person — is that her life and these sort of terrible things that happened to her don’t seem to be that out of the ordinary. She doesn’t seem to be out of the ordinary, especially in this sort of pre-statehood Arizona.

What kind of light do you think sheds on what we think about the Old West? Like the Wild West, this sort of romanticized vision of what a territorial Arizona was?

PAGÁN: Yeah, great question. So my reconstruction of the Old West or the Wild West based on my last book on the Pleasant Valley War but also this one, of course it’s very different than what Hollywood portrays, very, very different.

We as a country have wrestled with opioid addiction since the beginning. So one statistic that is commonly used is that after the Civil War, it’s estimated about 400,000 veterans came back addicted to morphine. It was widely used during the Civil War.

And so you’ve got a nation that’s already wrestling with addiction. And this epidemic that we talk about now, it’s not new, it’s been going on for over a century, and the international efforts and national efforts to try and stop the trade have not worked.

Now, I’m not trying to advocate for anything differently, but I can just stand back and look. We’ve been at this for over 100 years, and it’s the same problem and the same approaches: cutting off the supply. And so the question I began to ask myself was, “Well, why?”

And and I think the answer is pretty clear, the demand is very high. In the modern times, it was the overprescription of prescribed drugs — and it was often for chronic pain — that got a lot of middle-class people hooked on opioids, right?

And the same thing was the case in the 19th century. Again, it was an escape from pain — emotional pain, physical pain, all those kinds of things.

GILGER: Amazing the lessons we don’t learn from our own history, right? We’ll leave it there.

Eduardo Obregón Pagán, ASU Bob Stump Endowed Professor of History, author of the new book “Tumbleweed Underworld: A Saga of Morphine and Mayhem in the Arizona Territory.”

Eduardo, thank you very much for coming in. I appreciate it.

PAGÁN: Thank you, my pleasure.

ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow. Thanks for listening.