About the AuthorKelli 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 |
IntroductionJust at the intersection of New Mexico highways 152 and 356, the Santa Rita Shrine sits tucked in a battlefield of dying mining towns, a lone structure reminiscent of one of the largest mining communities in the Southwest. This shrine marks the existence of the town of Santa Rita, the townsite for the Chino Mine. In 1910, the company began open-pit mining on the edge of town. By the 1930’s, new technologies lined the pockets of company executives, and the mine transitioned entirely into an open pit, rapidly extracting more copper and slowly eating away at the land around Santa Rita. By 1970, the town was completely gone (Huggard and Humble 1-4). Now, the Santa Rita Shrine works as both a place of memory and a place of mourning for the community that lost almost everything to the mining industry. In this article, I hope to illuminate how local monuments like the Santa Rita Shrine are places of empowerment and stand as a way of linking communities with their history through a shared sense of home. First, I will explain how I came to know about Santa Rita and the Shrine. Then, I will explore the unique sense of loss the residents of Santa Rita experienced as they witnessed the destruction of their physical home. Finally, using the publics approach from Jenny Rice’s scholarship on urban development in combinations with Carole Blair’s work in memorial sites as material rhetorics, I will explore the negotiation between company and community that led to establishing the Santa Rita Shrine, and how the Shrine became a local monument in memory of the town. |
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