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 |
The ShrineLast July, I visited Grant County, New Mexico, with a team of graduate students to facilitate community writing workshops and collect stories to “recognize the lives, labor, and leadership of the women and men of the Local 890” and celebrate the social change and desegregation they brought to the community (Salt of the Earth Recovery Project, “Mission and Vision Statements”). The Local 890 was a chapter of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers that played a major role in fighting for the rights of Mexican American1 mine workers. While talking with the participants about how to honor the Local 890, I came to know about the Santa Rita Shrine. Workshop participant Willie Andazola was present during the strikes as a child, and he later grew up to join the Union. Today, he is one of the Santa Ritans that maintains the shrine. In his written account, Andazola notes the importance of the shrine as a sacred plot of land that cannot be touched. He says:
In our personal interaction, he went on to tell me how the Shrine is a safe place for Santa Ritans to honor those who have passed and those who fought in the groundbreaking Empire Zinc Mine Strikes that had brought about social change to Grant County. Intrigued by Andazola’s description, I wanted to know more about why this was the place to put a statue, and why “They can’t do anything to it.” Who is “they,” and why is a shrine the ideal place to remember the men and women of the Local 890? I scoured the humble Santa Rita Archives at the Silver City Public Library in search of answers. This article grows out of those newspaper clippings and one book, Santa Rita del Cobre, co-written by historian and former Santa Rita resident Terrance “Terry” Humble, who was also a participant in our writing workshop. When I first began writing about the Shrine, it was before the vandalism that took place in October 2018. The statue of Santa Rita still stood in her adobe terrarium, holding a rosary and overlooking a memorial to Grant County veterans. Apart from the statue, sixteen benches serve as pews on that fenced-in hillside, each with a different community member’s name engraved on it. Off in the distance, heavy equipment hauls materials across the exposed surface of the mine‒the shaving away of a quarry: pink, yellow, brown, and green rock exposing the bones of the Central mining district. It is one of the most beautiful views in Southern New Mexico if you can forget that it is the scar which marks where a whole town was torn from the Earth. The statue of Santa Rita, the only citizen left in the town, had watched over the all-consuming Chino Mine and prayed for the families whose lives and homes were destroyed by the mining industry. Across the pews, looking south toward the exposed rainbow carcass of earth, a plaque reads:
 Figure 1: Photograph of Plaque at Santa Rita Shrine The plaque posted up in the corner of the shrine is a reminder of the tragic story of Santa Rita, which I will explore in greater detail later in this article. But the plaque speaks in half-truths about the devastations of Santa Rita, as though the plot of land smaller than the average backyard is a gift for people whose entire community is gone. The residents of Santa Rita did not evacuate—an optional migration in the event of a natural disaster; they were evicted by Kennecott Copper Mining Company, who owned the land in and around the mine and ruled over it mercilessly. In the next section, I will explain how the citizens of Santa Rita were forced to flee as the mine consumed their church, stores, and homes. The Santa Rita Shine unofficially commemorates their loss, but the wording on the plaque understates the symbolic value of the memorial site and the struggle Santa Ritans endured.
1. Using language to classify groups of people is a complicated issue of identity, especially in Southern New Mexico. While I use the term Mexican American to describe some of the members of the community, they often use Mexican, Spanish, Spanish-speaking, Hispanic, and Chicano interchangeably to describe people of Mexican descent. It is important to note that most of these Mexican American families have lived in New Mexico for generations, many even before the Gadsden Purchase. |
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