Santa Rita no longer exists. It is not even a ghost town. Locals know it as the “town in space.” During the course of the twentieth century, mining companies literally dug up the ground beneath the copper camp. First named El Cobre, or “Copper,” by the Spanish for the vast outcroppings of raw native copper, the mining community from its inception centered its activities on digging up the rich, nearly pure nuggets of the red metal in the heart of the Apache homeland Apachería (see figure 0.1). First the Spanish and then the Mexicans struggled to create an enduring settlement...

In 1799 José Manuel Carrasco struck virgin copper. The retired lieutenant colonel had rediscovered the richest native copper deposit in North America. Taken to the lustrous outcroppings by a small group of Apaches he had assisted in hard times while serving as captain of the Presidio of Carrizal in northern Chihuahua, the Spaniard thought he had found the mother lode of copper deposits (see figure 1.1). But he knew he and those who followed him to this place would have to contend with the native peoples. The Spanish officer had spent much of the preceding thirty years pursuing and fighting...

Santa Rita del Cobre was in the heart of contested territory. The Apaches had the upper hand.The Spanish could not control this borderland region prior to 1821, and the Mexicans found it even more difficult afterward because of the complications of building a new nation-state. The presence of the Americans did mark an interesting turning point. Yet, not until 1848 would the emergent US Empire take possession of the borderlands into which its entrepreneurs, miners, and trappers had made inroads. Even then the Apaches would still reign supreme in the region for at least another ten years. Indicative of the...

The Chino Copper Company initiated open-pit mining on September 23, 1910. That day the new corporation’s Marion 91 steam shovel Number 2 scooped its first bucket of lowgrade porphyry copper (see figure 3.1). Thus began the stairstep descent in the quest to remove hundreds of millions of tons of earth peppered with minute flakes of copper deep in the bowels of the mountainous terrain. A new era had dawned at Santa Rita. Using the latest economies-of-scale technology, the newly incorporated mining company joined the international open-pit copper family that would dominate the industry throughout the twentieth century. No longer would...

By 1970 Santa Rita no longer existed. The steady march of the mining operations ate away at the hilly terrain. The open pit grew to an enormous size and the copper town actually disappeared. The shovel crews so thoroughly reconfigured the landscape that there was no earthen foundation left for the workers’ homes and the company’s store, hospital, and workshops. Although Santa Ritans knew of this impending destruction, which materialized over three decades, they felt an acute sense of loss. Now they had only their memories of the community. It dawned on many former residents that where Santa Rita once...

In 1955 the Chino Mines Division of the Kennecott Copper Corporation premiered Chinorama. Modeled after the multinational corporation’s Kennescope,¹ the colorful glossy monthly magazine replaced the company towns at the Santa Rita–Hurley complex in New Mexico as the symbol of a maturing industrial “family.” Clearly, officials hoped to retain the paternalistic overtone of the company-town era, especially after the sale of Kennecott’s property to the real estate firm of John W. Galbreath & Company in this mining-milling-smelting corridor of Grant County, New Mexico. They were attempting to use Chinorama to perpetuate that patriarchal tradition. The popular publication peppered with...

Chino’s future is uncertain early in the twenty-first century. Escalating operational costs, dwindling ore grades, decline in water supplies, and environmental remediation have complicated successive owners’ ability to earn a profit at the nation’s fourth-largest open-pit copper mine. Still, Kennecott’s successors at Chino, Phelps Dodge from 1986 until 2007 and Freeport-McMoRan since, have employed as many as 1,400 workers at the century-old open-pit mining, milling, and smelting complex. The economic benefit to Grant County and New Mexico generally has been phenomenal despite the impending demise of the mining enterprise. Since 1999 the companies have paid out more than $300 million...