“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 Future of Santa Rita

Memory sites like the Santa Rita Shrine are not only rhetorical texts in the sense that they have writing on the plaques and pews. Memorials themselves are material texts because questions arise from their very existence (Blair 30). What is the significance of the Shrine’s existence? Because the shrine exists, it denotes that something is worthy of attention—like the shaving away of the landscape one mile east of the Shrine, and the supposed evacuation of residents. As a memorial, the Shrine works as a cultural symbol to translate a chronological series of events in the past (history) into psychological time (memory), and it translates the physical space on the hillside into a social space of remembering.

Scholarship in public memory has repeatedly found that public memory is equally concerned with narrating the past as it is with actively navigating the present (Blair, Dickinson et al., Rice). The Santa Rita Shrine is an important memorial for Grant County, especially in this precarious moment. Those who remember the pain of Santa Rita’s removal watch the resurrection of destruction as the Chino Mine has begun a new rapid process of mining—mountaintop removal. Rather than continuing to blast away at the pit, they are flattening the mountain that overlooks the nearby town of Hanover. Removing one town was sufficient for maintaining production for 48 years, and now locals question if operations have again “reached a point where another program for removal is necessary” (Kennecott 2). Hanover, New Mexico, watches the mine encroach on their homes. The mining company has yet to issue evacuation orders, but their history with the community and the nature of mining fuel anxiety over the future of other towns in the Central mining district. For the purpose of preserving the memory of the community, the Santa Rita Shrine is more important than ever. Yet, as we know from reading Blair’s research on rhetorics of materiality, “durable material may actually render a text more vulnerable” (37).

On October 2, 2018, vandals struck at the Santa Rita Shrine. Having become acquainted with the stories and people of the Central mining district, I was shocked to see the Shrine in such disarray. Flats of cardboard cover the busted glass, and crime scene tape sections off the enclosure. The statue’s pedestal sits empty; the last remaining resident of Santa Rita is gone, and her absence plays an interesting role in negotiating identity and memory in Grant County, as residents of nearby mining towns worry other towns will be swallowed by the mine. What do we make of a shine’s significance when the religious artifact is no longer there? A recent Silver City Daily Press article explains,

The irreplaceable statue of the Virgen de Santa Rita from 1943 that was in the original Catholic church in the town that no longer exists [was] smashed to the ground. Broken glass everywhere. The concrete tiled corners of the memorial to the Santa Rita boys killed in Vietnam also smashed, the cone vases with their plastic flowers thrown to the ground.” (Steele, “Vandals Strike”)

It is interesting that the local community combines two women in the news article. Santa Rita and La Virgen de Guadalupe both symbolize an aspect of cultural identity in Grant County. As I discussed before, Santa Rita protects miners and offers hope for seemingly lost causes; la Virgen de Guadalupe signifies Mexican, Catholic identity. Both women symbolize working-class struggles of the predominantly Mexican American miners. The combination in the article is likely a mistake, but it reveals the connectedness Santa Ritans feel with both aspects of their identity. It is clear the statue at the Santa Rita Shrine is symbolic for Santa Ritans themselves. Given the anti-union sentiment in the mining district and talk of commissioning a statue on the grounds of the Santa Rita Shrine to commemorate the Local 890, I suspect the destruction of the Shrine was an act of rhetorical aggression. Obliterating this precious artifact of cultural memory, was meant to erase a sense of shared past and send a message to the future about the prospects of solidarity.²

Figure 5: Photograph depicting damage to the Santa Rita Shrine, taken by Christine Steele for the Silver City Daily Press (“Reward Offered”).

Artifacts of memory not only point to moments in the past, but the social climate also anticipates something about the future. As the mine encroaches on other nearby towns, Grant County residents cannot afford to have their recollection of Santa Rita dismembered. If the extraction industry continues to value profits over people, the future of Grant County is grave not only for all Santa Ritans, but also for future generations of environmental extraction refugees. Now Santa Rita is a whisper of pews behind a chain-linked fence, and nearby mining towns of Hanover and Fierro dwindle as the pit runs dry again.