The Phelps Dodge Strike: Copper That Built Arizona

The landscape southeast of Tucson, down through the Sulphur Springs Valley and into the mountains along the Mexican border, is copper country. The ore was there before the Spanish arrived, and the mines that opened after American annexation made Arizona one of the wealthiest mineral-producing regions in the world. The companies that owned those mines became, in some towns, the effective government.

Phelps Dodge Corporation operated the mines at Bisbee, at Morenci, at Clifton. In nineteen seventeen, when workers at the Bisbee mines organized a strike, the Cochise County Sheriff and Phelps Dodge deputized two thousand men and loaded twelve hundred strikers into cattle cars at gunpoint, transporting them to the New Mexico desert and abandoning them. That event, the Bisbee Deportation, was the largest single removal of labor organizers in American history.

In nineteen eighty-three, when copper prices crashed and Phelps Dodge announced it would not renew its contract with thirteen unions at the Morenci mine, workers went on strike on July first. The company hired replacement workers. The Arizona governor deployed three hundred and twenty-five National Guard troops, backed by armored vehicles and state police, to protect the strikebreakers. The strike lasted more than two years. In nineteen eighty-five, the company decertified all thirteen unions. The workers who had struck never got their jobs back.

The women of the striking families organized their own actions, standing in roads, confronting strikebreakers, maintaining picket lines when their husbands were arrested. Many were Mexican American, from families that had worked the mines for generations, and their resistance drew on a history of labor and border and identity that goes back through the copper towns and further.

The Morenci mine is still operating. It is now owned by Freeport-McMoRan and is the largest copper mine in North America.