Bisbee's Copper Town: Before and After the Deportation
Near Bisbee, Arizona
Bisbee in nineteen seventeen was one of the wealthiest cities in the American Southwest. The Phelps Dodge Corporation's copper mines in the Mule Mountains produced the metal that wired the nation's electrical infrastructure, and the city that had grown up around those mines had grand Victorian storefronts, a library, and a sense of itself as a real place rather than a camp.
The workforce that made all of it possible was divided. The "Mexican wage" was a formal policy across Phelps Dodge operations: Mexican and Mexican American workers received lower pay than Anglo workers for identical underground labor. This was not informal discrimination. It was written into the labor structure of the company that controlled the town.
When the Industrial Workers of the World organized across racial lines in the summer of nineteen seventeen, they did so partly on the argument that the Mexican wage had to end. The strike that began on June twenty-sixth drew more than three thousand workers, cutting across ethnic divisions in a way that alarmed both Phelps Dodge management and the county sheriff's office.
The company and the sheriff's office removed the problem. Twelve hundred and eighty-six workers went into cattle cars on July twelfth. The copper kept moving. Phelps Dodge continued to operate in the region for decades.
Bisbee declined after the copper markets did, and by the nineteen sixties the mines were winding down. The Lavender Pit, an open-pit operation that replaced the underground mines, is still visible from the historic downtown. The Victorian commercial district survived because the company did not tear it down, and because artists and retirees began arriving in the nineteen seventies when the real estate was cheap.
The town draws visitors today for the architecture and the landscape. The deportation is documented at the local museum, and the Phelps Dodge role in both the prosperity and the removal is part of the documented record. The workers who were put in those cattle cars never came back.
