This piece is part of an Annenberg News 21 collaboration with The Guardian examining the Latino vote in the 2012 presidential election. 

For the past decade, Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio has embodied Arizona's high-profile crackdown on undocumented immigrants and, some would say, on Latinos in general. The man who calls himself "America's toughest sheriff" has raided communities around and in the state capital, Phoenix, delicately dubbing the operations "crime-suppression sweeps."

Before abruptly halting them at the end of 2011, Arpaio carried out 20 sweeps, arresting 1,500 people.

One of the smallest communities Arpaio raided, and the county's poorest, fought back the hardest, helping to ignite a backlash against anti-immigrant policies that is changing the face of Arizona politics. Guadalupe, a one-square-mile community of 5,500 perched on the edge of southeast Phoenix and 61 percent Hispanic, was the first to stand up to the sheriff.

As the 2012 presidential election looms, Guadalupe's counter-punch to Arpaio shows just how explosive the power of the Latino community might be throughout the state, particularly in energizing the youth. Just how much this will matter in November remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: the political momentum has radically shifted, and the Latino electorate can feel the wind on its backs.

Battered by Arpaio's sweeps and the nation's harshest series of anti-immigrant legislation for most of the last decade, the state's Hispanic community is now an angry and energized demographic that is mobilizing and fighting back.

In the last four years, Hispanics have elected a growing number of candidates to the Phoenix city council and state legislature. Last November, they recalled the roaring lion of the state's anti-immigrant image, former state senator Russell Pearce. It was a humiliating fall for the leader of the Republicans in the Arizona senate who was the architect behind the nationally polarizing "papers please" law SB1070, and a key supporter of a ballot initiative passed in 2004 that demanded proof of citizenship for public services. Arpaio, too, faces a civil lawsuit in the Arizona courts for alleged racial profiling though a second legal challenge by the US justice department was recently dropped.

On the night of one of his raids in 2008, Mayor Rebecca Jimenez met Arpaio face-to-face, surrounded by 250 angry community members as his deputies flooded her town. She handed him a statement from the town's council, telling him not to come back.

"He erupted. He was so mad that spit flew on my face," Jimenez said. "He told me: 'You don't want us back?' And I said: 'No, we don't want you back.' He said: 'Too bad, I'm coming back tomorrow.' But he didn't."