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 |
Shrines and MemorialsThe strategic framing of the site as a “shrine,” although accurate in definition, does not fully acknowledge the corporation’s role in the destruction of Santa Rita. The plaque at the Shrine illuminates two things about the shrine. First, citizens of Santa Rita felt empowered to ask Kennecott for the land, and second, they always intended the Shrine to serve as a memorial. In this section, I will use Carole Blair’s work with memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric’s materiality to demonstrate how the Shrine is also a memorial site. Before I begin talking about the Shrine as a memorial, it’s important to note the difference between shrines and memorials; even though they share some characteristics, the purpose of each is distinctly different because of how an observer is meant to interact with each of the spaces. Shrines are sacred spaces, usually religious, marked by relics wherein a person prays or meditates. As the plaque notes, the Santa Rita Shrine is a shrine because the statue of Santa Rita resides there, and Santa Ritans were given blessing from the Catholic Church to erect the Shrine. However, the Shrine also serves all of the purposes of a memorial as outlined by the work of Carol Blair. First, the Shrine is symbolic (Blair 18); the statue of Santa Rita is a metonym for the citizens who were evicted. As all of the buildings in the town came down and people moved out, the statue safely waited out the demolition in El Paso, Texas, until the dedication of the Shrine on August 28, 1967. Because of their connection with the church and their shared history with the statue, Santa Ritans see themselves in the statue. Furthermore, apart from the statue, Santa Rita the saint is herself a cultural symbol—an “advocate for the impossible” and considered the “patron saint of miners” (“The Shrine of Santa Rita”).  Figure 3: An undated newspaper clipping from the Santa Rita Archives that shows an image of the Shrine before the vandalism. The caption reads: “The Shrine of Santa Rita, built and maintained by the people of the area to house the statue of Santa Rita. –Photo by BeeJay” Quite literally, she is meant to bless those who face impossible circumstances and protect miners. The plaque tells the story of both the statue and the town because the space is meant to serve as both a place of worship and a place of public remembering. True, the statue is the object around which Grant County citizens can pray. More importantly, it also represents the immovability and resilience of those who were displaced. Second, Blair finds that memorial sites are in conversation with other texts (39). As a memorial site, the shrine works against the rhetorical texts of Kennecott. When Kennecott began issuing orders to evacuate the town, they did so with little remorse and avoided taking responsibility for the eviction, but the erection of the shrine implicitly placed that responsibility back upon the mining company. From the start, Kennecott used their company magazine Chinorama to assert that the displacement of people is just as natural to mining as the extraction of ore. An article in the March-April 1965 edition of Chinorama begins, “Santa Rita is on the move again” (1), and goes on to explain that Santa Rita has gone through several minor movements since 1909. The opening line, “on the move again,” refers to a 1953 article from the Silver City Enterprise titled “Santa Rita Townsite ‘On the move.’” This article covered the news when Chino ordered the first buildings to be moved for the “extraction of ore bodies” (“Santa Rita Townsite ‘On the Move’”). This relocation moved several of the buildings in old “downtown,” leaving only the hospital and company operating buildings in the middle of the pit, which became known as “the island” (“Santa Rita Doesn’t Fit the Boom Town Image” 1). Regardless of how many times individual buildings moved for the expansion of the mine, none of these compare to the complete erasure of the whole town from 1965-1970. Kennecott underplays its responsibility in the continued suffering of Santa Ritans by framing this series of injustices as natural and inevitable. The nature of pit mining is expansive and destructive. Despite typical patterns of pit-mining, we cannot blame the eviction on nature nor necessity. Furthermore, Kennecott uses their rhetorical texts to explicate their legal right to extract people from their homes rather than to ease the hardship of the “removal program.” The Chinorama article clarifies:
Kennecott prefers to cover their tracks and assert their authority rather than apologize or even explain the stakes of their decision. The use of the law as justification allows Kennecott to position themselves as within their rights so as to avoid taking the blame for the destruction. They seem to assert that all citizens, (“both types of houses”) Anglo and Mexican American, are treated equally. Nevertheless, it is apparent that those who lost the houses they built and could not afford to live elsewhere—the laboring class—could likely never recover their losses.  Figure 4: Cover of the Chinorama issue explaining the history of migrations in Santa Rita to justify the complete eviction. Copy found in the Santa Rita Archives at the Silver City Public Library. From the perspective of Kennecott, the gifting of land for the Shrine is a public statement of consolation and an attempt to remedy tensions between the company and laborers; after all, they still needed workers. Instead of holding themselves responsible for the pain they caused, Kennecott chooses to reconcile with the community by gifting them the land for their statue. Kennecott could not give Santa Ritans the land under title of memorial because to do so would be an admission of guilt. Under the framework of a shrine, Kennecott could maintain that the cause of displacement is natural to mining and “necessary [to] operations” (Kennecott 2). To the passerby, the Shrine is just that, a place to hold the statue, but to the people of Grant County, the Shrine is in conversation with these texts about what causes the pain, and it allows the citizens of Santa Rita to speak against the injustice. With their strong sense of community, the citizens secured their own plaque to dedicate the Shrine alongside the story of the town, which insists that the significance of this intimate space moves beyond it being a quiet place to pray. Third, Blair reminds us that the link between the Shrine and the public memory is substantial (Blair 38). Memorials serve the specific rhetorical functions of public memory. In “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Pierre Nora describes what he calls memory sites, which connect history and memory. Memory sites are powerful symbolic places that reconstruct often painful realities for their publics. As a memory site, the Shrine reminds visitors of the devastation of the eviction through the eyes of the locals who lived there. The function of the Shrine as a memory site is also what inspires Willie Andazola to dedicate a new statue at the site of the Shrine, and it indicates that although we refer to it as a shrine, locals visit this place to be reminded of the past. Memory sites like the Santa Rita Shrine work on a shared social experience of memory. In 2003, sociologist Sheila L. Steinberg conducted a study of former Santa Ritans to understand community ties after the destruction of the town. One respondent in the survey explains, “It represents a wonderful community that exists only in our collective memory” (23). Although the plaque commemorates individuals, and each of the pews around the Shrine celebrates names of people who have passed on, the Shrine does not highlight a single experience. Rather than calling on the feeling of loss from one person, it works from what Bruce E. Gronbeck calls the “rhetoric of collective memory” to bridge individual experiences of loss (56). Collective memory works differently from history in that “the primary movement is not from the past to the present but the other way around . . . the collective memory is recalled, seemingly, so as to let the past guide the present. But it can only do so when the past is remade” (Bronbeck 56). The significance of the Shrine revolves around telling history through narratives and looking at the implications of those narratives on the present. |
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