ABSTRACT
During the extractive period in Arizona’s history-from the 1880s until World War II-boosters liked to brag that Arizona’s economy was dominated by the Three Cs: Copper, Cattle and Cotton. Of the three, Copper was clearly king. Arizona’s state house has a copper dome, and copper companies like Phelps Dodge exercised enormous political and economic power, breaking unions, manipulating territorial and state legislatures, writing state tax and county codes to their own advantage. In order to keep their labor costs down, the copper companies also pitted ethnic groups against one another to cripple organized labor and depress wages. In Arizona’s copper towns, idioms of race undercut idioms of class to weaken working-class solidarity. Later, idioms of ‘foreignness’ were employed to exacerbate xenophobic fears of sabotage during World War I, but those fears had strong racial, and particularly anti-Mexican, undertones. Because of Arizona’s proximity to the border and its reliance upon Mexican labor, ethnic conflict in Arizona’s copper communities usually revolved around management’s exploitation of, and organized labor’s profoundly ambivalent relationship to, Mexican workers (Sheridan 1986, 1995). The asymmetrical balance of power between management and labor in the copper industry was tipped even further by ethnic divisions among the miners and smelter workers themselves.
