a citizen for generations. White was white and Mexican was Mexican. The practice was ordered halted by the federal government in 1944 in response to a grievance filed by the Union, along with the threats of slowdowns and strikes. War and the Mine Mill, as the Union was known, convinced the National Non-Ferrous Metals Commission to find “a consistent pattern of discriminatory rates” at Miami Copper Company and Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company, also in Miami. The Commission ordered equal pay for equal work.1 The company’s entrenched racism was not so easily extinguished, however. They equalized the workforce during the war, but shortly afterwards furtively returned to their old habits. As late as 1963 the Union was in federal court alleging wage discrimination. The federal district judge entered a decision in September of 1973 ordering back pay. In November 1978, Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company finally sent a memo to all Mexican-American and Indian employees, notifying them that they were eligible for back pay.
The Mine Mill was the successor to the Western Mining Federation that initiated the strikes in the Clifton-Morenci mining district of Arizona in 1915, and also the strike in Bisbee. It was the Bisbee strike that led to the infamous deportations of at least 1,200 miners, mostly Mexicans. The striking miners were forced at gunpoint into cattle cars owned by the mining company’s private railroad, transported to the desert near Columbus, New Mexico, and abandoned there. As word of the mass kidnapping spread throughout the country a national scandal ensued. President Wilson sent the Army to build a shelter and to feed and care for the men and ultimately to assure their safe return to Bisbee. The Mine Mill was born in controversy, embraced Mexican workers, and from the beginning was depicted by the mining companies and by the rival “white” unions as radical, leftist, and communist. The Mine Mill was indeed the most militant union, and it was also the leading advocate for the rights of local Mexican families, continually subject to discrimination and segregation.
The entry into the town from the big city of Phoenix some seventy miles away was through west Live Oak Street. West Live Oak had been populated by Mexicans and the few “colored” families in town since its founding by Cleve Van Dyke. Van Dyke died as the war ended. His son-in-law Watson Fitz assumed control of the Miami Townsite Company, and Fitz, unlike Van Dyke, wanted money fast. With the war over, the town anticipated that the sinewy, dangerous mountain road that connected Phoenix to Miami would finally be improved and visitors would soon be arriving. When they did arrive, they would unfortunately have to pass through a gauntlet of Mexican and colored families that lived along west Live Oak before arriving at the bustle of bars, gambling salons, whorehouses, and businesses that lined downtown Miami. Thus Mexicans, colored folk, and the fast money they were in the way of became the motivations for Miami’s major urban renewal and racial cleansing project. Fitz announced the commercial and residential development in 1947, promising “large restricted home sites”: the fact that Mexican and colored families were renting those home sites and had been doing so for years made little difference. They would have to move.
The campaign against the Mexican and colored families moved quickly. A prominent Mexican American, A. J. Flores, was recruited to lead the charge and “get rid of the shacks.” As a kid I never heard anyone say a kind word about A. J. Flores. He was considered a pariah, a quisling, a sell-out, and worse. I was surprised to discover, when I read a transcript of a conversation with him recorded in 2001, fifty years after the demolition of those homes, that A. J. was still trying to defend himself:
The Mexicans had no aspirations. They liked living in shacks or else they would have done something about it. They didn’t want anything better. They didn’t care enough to take care of their own homes. If the Town did nothing, Mexicans and Negroes would continue to live that way. It was time to bring in someone to take care of that area. The Town had to raise the quality of life there and they had to control the town’s growth to make it livable.2
I hope A. J. was paid a lot of money. He was held in contempt by the miners and constantly ridiculed behind his back. That should be expensive. In the late 1990s, after years of economic decline, on the verge of becoming a ghost town and with few folks remaining who remembered the relocations, Miami elected a very bitter A. J. as town mayor. Most folks in Miami had forgotten why the cloud of suspicion hovers about A. J., but obviously he never will.
The Union mounted a major effort to stop the relocation, but it had no influence with the town fathers, and they were unable to curb Watson Fitz’s lust for quick money. After the relocation, the Union committed itself to gaining control of city hall. It would take them over a decade to do it. There was one, not so small, secondary consequence of the relocation for us: we moved from Depot Hill into a “shack” in Davis Canyon, one of those colored and Mexican canyons that families from west Live Oak were forced into. Many of the black families left altogether after the wave of hate that spread through the town. The small two-room house was nestled against a hillside abutting a natural cave. The cave, once plastered and ventilated, became the third room of the house. I lived in that house until I left for the Army years later.
The highway entering Miami from Phoenix, even before it reached the renewal project of west Live Oak, would edge next to a dry wash for perhaps a half-mile. If you were to peer down into the wash you would see a teeming camp of shacks, beat-up trailers, tents, outhouses, campfires, and half-clothed kids running amuck. That was Mackey’s Camp. The “okies” of the camp were all white. There were perhaps a hundred or more transient families in the camp, kept there—the Union men said—so that the company would have a ready supply of strike-breakers should the Mine Mill decide to call a Bolshevik strike. Some of the “okie” families moved into the Mexican canyons when the west Live Oak renewal project made homes available. Most just drifted away to destinations unknown. Watson Fitz and the town fathers apparently never thought to forcibly remove the white squatters, and A. J. never publicly demanded that the town get rid of their shacks.
When I was just a kid I remember the great joy when my older brothers would take me to the YMCA swimming pool on Saturday. It was only years later that I realized my father refused to join my mother’s Christian activities because the Christians who ran the Y would only let the Mexicans swim for a few hours on Saturday night. That was the night they drained the pool. He refused to join his mother at Catholic mass as well. The mass was in Latin in those days, so language was no excuse to segregate, but segregate they did. The Mexicans sat on the left side and the whites on the right. The practice apparently began in the 1920s when Thomas O’Brien, superintendent of Inspiration Mine and president of the Valley National Bank, complained that the Mexicans were dirty, stank, and were stealing women’s purses. He threatened the priest with withholding his offering unless something was done. Segregation under God and separate lines for communion, whites on the right and Mexicans on the left, was the result.3
The school system was integrated after my second year at Bullion Plaza Elementary, the Mexican school. The summer before the integrated school year was to begin there was much debate at the union hall and at El Divino Salvador, the Spanish-language Presbyterian Church, about the plan. My mother was vehemently opposed to her children going to school with “gringos patas saladas.” The phrase translates literally as salty-legged gringos. It meant that gringos were unwashed, filthy, and full of fleas. They were also, according to the church ladies, rude, uncivilized, lazy, and not bright enough to get out of a dry creek when it rained. The Union had demanded that schools be integrated, and a court in Phoenix had finally ordered it, but my mother wanted that judge to come and see how the gringos who lived in filth at Mackey’s Camp allowed their children to dress and act. The judge never came, integration proceeded without incident, fleas never infested her children, and Mackey’s Camp soon disappeared.
The noted demographer and historian David Hayes-Bautista graphs the dramatic changes in the population of Latinos between 1930 and 1940. In California there were nearly 200,000 Latino immigrants in 1930 and only 168,848 US-born Latinos, according to the Census. By 1940, immigrant Latinos had dropped significantly to slightly over 100,000, but the number of children born in the US had zoomed upwards to 262,100.4 The decade of deportations had indeed taken its toll, and one measure was the absolute drop in number of immigrants who remained in the country.
