“The Shrine of Chino Mine: Extraction Rhetoric and Public Memory in Southern New Mexico”

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About the Author

Kelli Lycke Martin is a graduate teaching instructor and PhD candidate at the University of Arizona. She wrote this article during the last year of her master’s program in Rhetoric and Writing at The University of New Mexico. Her research interests include cultural memory sites and historical discourse rhetorics of labor, resistance & protest.

Contents

Introduction

The Shrine

The Injury of Extraction

Shrines and Memorials

Memory of Santa Rita

The Future of Santa Rita

Works Cited

The Injury of Extraction

The history of the town is essential for contextualizing the significance of the Santa Rita Shrine because the shrine emerges as a response to the destruction of Santa Rita, a crisis of modern extraction practices. Drawing upon Rice in Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis, “to call [something] a crisis is to recognize the changes that are happening to the ecology” (28). In Santa Rita, the ecology of the mining town includes an understanding of the town’s history, economy, labor practices, and racial relations.

In 1910, the Chino Copper Company, a division of Kennecott Copper Corporation, began open-pit mining on the edges of Santa Rita, New Mexico. At the time, the town consisted of around 1600 residential houses in addition to company stores and a church. In the 1910s and 1920s, mining corporations often built the mining towns to attract workers who would not disappear when they heard the rumors of more lucrative mines elsewhere. Companies knew that if miners had a place to live with their families, they would find it harder to leave (Baker 37). New mining techniques and technology allowed the Chino Mine to grow in success and profits, and by 1916 it was producing almost 60% of all North American copper (Huggard and Humble). In order to accommodate the expanding mine, Santa Rita went through a series of small relocations starting in the 1950s. The company moved pieces of the town as the pit grew. In 1960, the company issued a removal notice which stated, “all houses must be cleared” (Kennecott 2), and by 1970 the town was gone.

From the inception of Santa Rita, the mining companies structured the city layout to give complete power to the mining company. The Chino Copper Company built the community with racial and ethnic injustice in place as an asset to the company by separating “Santa Rita,” the Anglo neighborhoods, from “East Rita,” sometimes also called “Mexican Town.” Bigger houses with plumbing were built on paved roads to accommodate Anglo managers and superintendents while the company rented lots without access to electricity or plumbing to the Mexican American laborers who made up about 80% of the county and were encouraged to build their own houses. Conditions in the “Indian Village” were even worse. Housing “consisted of tar-paper shacks” near the mine’s waste dumps (Baker 63). The lower wages ensured the laborers could never afford to change the power dynamics (Baker 79; Huggard and Humble 112-114). Kennecott placed workers of color in the lowest job positions so they did not have the means to confront the company about the unfair living conditions. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the solidarity of Local 890, the predominantly Mexican American chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, bargained with the local mining companies, including Kennecott, for better housing conditions and fairer wages. However, they were never able to overturn what physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer calls the pathology of power. Farmer’s scholarship refers to the way human rights issues are often the direct result of political and economic power abuses. In this case, the economic and political climate of the town, among other circumstances, held citizens of these mining towns vulnerable and defenseless against their employer.

Kennecott's ability to displace a whole community without repercussions comes from a long history of unchecked power abuse. Santa Ritans were well aware of the power of la companía. In his June 10th, 1985, edition of “Memories of Santa Rita,” one former resident recalls:

Although Santa Rita was a pretty freewheeling town, there were limits to what one could get away with. The company had absolute ironclad control over who lived in the town and if one exceeded the limits of company-defined decorum, he was politely, but firmly invited to leave. Some of the acts that precipitated such an invitation were: Excessive family fights, flagrant immorality (especially if it involves someone else’s spouse), stealing, and other greater or lesser sins as defined and judged only by the company whose world was law, and there was no appeal. (Jones 8)

Jones went on to write these memories in the local newspaper for several weeks. While Jones began the newspaper series “Memories of Santa Rita” simply to recall his own experiences, the stories illustrate social and economic injustices in the mining district.

While the company fronts as providing basic human rights—healthcare, clean water, education—their ability to fire and evict citizens at will and without an appeal is a direct violation of civil rights. Farmer calls this structural violence because of how the rights violations, in this case the eviction of Santa Ritans from their basic right to home, “are symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are ultimately linked to social conditions” (7).  Furthermore, structural violence like the imbalance of power in Santa Rita allows the ideologies of economy to “conceal or even justify assaults on human dignity” (7). We see this in the way Kennecott uses the economic growth and success of the mine to offer the erroneous justification that the mine had “reached a point where another program for the removal of houses and buildings from Santa Rita town is necessary” (Kennecott Copper Corporation 2 ). While Santa Ritans had “freedoms on paper” (Farmer 7), the structure of violence ultimately ensured they could not defend their social and economic rights. Once we understand how little say Santa Ritans had in their community, the distinction between the supposed “evacuation” and eviction becomes clear. Despite having built their own homes, the company-owned plots left citizens without the gathering space to commemorate their losses and without the artifacts to construct a history to fit their perspectives.

As the earth was torn from under their feet, not only where they lived but where they went for spiritual rejuvenation, citizens of Santa Rita were left with nothing. Like the copper beneath them, Santa Ritans were extracted from their homes as Kennecott moved toward more aggressive mining tactics. Less than 34% of Santa Ritans stayed in Grant County; About 40% of Santa Ritans left the state altogether to seek work far from the devastation (Steinberg 18). The extraction refugees who stayed in the area were forced to move into the nearby towns of Silver City, Bayard, or Hurley; families and their neighbors split apart. We know from Jenny Rice that “a change in a place’s ecology disturbs the centers of our existence,” and “Nowhere is the anxiety of ecological disturbance felt more than non-places” (31). However, Rice’s work in urban development does not begin to describe the non-space the extraction industry leaves behind. Their town was not gentrified or transformed; it was wiped out entirely. When Kennecott asserted its power to repossess all of the lands, they left families defenseless, homesick, and mourning.

Santa Ritans experienced a uniquely environmental devastation linked to the influences of extraction industries. Glenn Albrecht coins the term “solastalgia” in his article “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity” to describe the sense of distress and loss communities experience with rapid destruction of their homes. Albrecht’s theory of solastalgia can help explain how Santa Ritans’ “place-based distress was also connected to a sense of powerlessness and a sense that environmental injustice was being perpetrated on them” through an imposed transition of place and the feeling of powerlessness (47-48). Santa Ritans watched as a pit expanded to consume their homes. This grief is intensified knowing the Santa Rita citizens were the ones both assaulting and being assaulted. They dug the pit during the day and came home to sleep in houses they would sweep away. They understood that their paychecks would cost them their lives as they knew it. As the citizens of Santa Rita grieved and watched Kennecott strip away their lands, they felt a “relationship between the psychic identity and their home. What [Santa Ritans] lacked was the solace of comfort derived from their present relationship to ‘home’” (Albrecht 48). The destruction of one’s land is the devastation of one’s identity, especially in a mining town where the earth is tied to their culture.

A two-part special commemorative article from the Silver City Daily Press by Steven Siegfried highlights the pain citizens face. He writes about Santa Ritan Ruben Gonzales, who is so distraught as he watches the demolition that he began collecting salvage remnants from the church and storing them in his garage. Gonzales, the once miner and now artist, explains:

Every time I came home, I looked at the Catholic church. They were tearing it down. The old church burned. The company helped the people build the new church. It broke my heart when they tore the new church down. I am a very sentimental person. I painted the church [in my artwork]. I still do...I still use pieces from those things [I collected from wreckage] in my assemblages and art. I’ll put a piece in a chair or furniture. I still have a piece of stained glass from the church. (“Neighborhoods Thrived in Santa Rita Community” 3)

Gonzales collects these fragments of the same Catholic church the statue of Santa Rita came from. These souvenirs are testimony that it once existed, like the way we hold onto pictures of loved ones who have passed away, with a longing to remember and the pain of never being able to see them again.

Figure 2: A certificate from the Society of Persons Born in Space to acknowledge that Jean Hughes was born in the Santa Rita Spaceport—as found in the Santa Rita Archives at the Silver City Public Library

As a result of their loss, Santa Ritans began describing the pain they faced at the hands of the company. They talk amongst each other in public forums such as newspapers and newsletters and often use injury claims to frame themselves as victims of tragedy (Rice). One example of this comes from the same article by Steven Siegfried. In it, Santa Ritan Myrtle Humble makes clear the devastation of this dismantling for her mother: “It was heartbreaking when they tore down Santa Rita. My mother would never go back there. She moved to an apartment in Silver [City], and she’d never go back there” (2). Injury claims can disempower the injured by investing in historical narratives of suffering, thus “produc[ing] and maintain[ing] the citizen-victim that transforms the wound into identity” (Rice 82). In fact, the people of Santa Rita sometimes refer to themselves as the “Persons Born in Space” for the fact that where they grew up is literally an empty space in the middle of the mining pit (Huggard and Humble, Moore and Schmitt), as the image shown in Figure Two illustrates.

It is important to note that this unique pain is both the point of injury and the point of invention. Simultaneously these injury claims become the material through which communities form a public. Despite the deep pain Santa Ritans faced, “the wound site becomes a stable displacement for a more complex history and social wrong; yet it is also the site of invention” (Rice 82). Through public correspondence about the pain, the community maintains their civic engagement and they are able to advocate for the memory of the town to live on. While the physical public spaces to communicate‒their churches, schools, and parks‒are gone, it was this sense of shared loss that allowed the community to advocate for the erection of the Santa Rita Shrine.