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Article Excerpt
My desire to live and study in Douglas, Arizona, a town adjacent to the Mexican city of Agua Prieta, Sonora, arose from an interest in borders. The very concept was evocative: the boundary between one thing and another, the place where two cultures meet and coexist, both a symbol of organizing principles and a perplexing location that refuses to be neatly categorized. Yet, conceptually, all of these ideas could be seen in Tucson or Phoenix, cities some distance from the international boundary. People with different cultures interact frequently in Phoenix, and many embody more than one cultural tradition. From this perspective, a journey to the border line was unnecessary. Furthermore, Tucson is only sixty-four miles from the border. At what point is a community too far from the border to be part of the borderland?
All of these issues have been debated by anthropologists interested in borders, who attempt to make general statements about how people construct and challenge boundaries. A great deal of the literature on borders necessarily confronts theories of nations and nationalism. As a result, special attention has been paid to transnational processes, and authors have stressed the importance of global networks, which call attention to the deconstruction of communities. Theorists have suggested that the identities of borderlanders also transcend boundaries and challenge any unified concept of self. Unfortunately, this perspective has sometimes been removed from local experiences. Some border researchers have responded by calling for a return to the local and a focus on the construction, not the deconstruction, of place.
I went to Douglas hoping to add a detailed ethnographic account to this debate. I chose a town that was indisputably part of the borderland, located adjacent to the corrugated metal fence that marks the international boundary, in order to compare my findings with descriptions of border communities located farther from that line. I similarly went to a small town, rather than a large urban area, because of the relative scarcity of ethnographies of rural border communities. My research focused on the experiences of people in Douglas and Agua Prieta, the ways they discussed their home and their lives, their everyday behaviors and exceptional events. I sought to understand the border through their practices, rather than endeavoring to explain those behaviors with generalized theories about globalization and transnationalism. Living in Douglas for a year, I performed interviews and participant-observation, concentrating on the local high school. Focusing on two arenas for study, education and identity, facilitated my theoretical approach to borders and borderlands. I employed an experiential approach to borders, paying attention to the behaviors of borderlanders and the contexts in which those behaviors occur (Goldberg 2005).
Understanding identity in Douglas meant understanding the identity of Douglas. Places are always made, or constructed, by people. A place is a space that has a meaning, or multiple meanings. The term space, if space can be said to exist, denotes an empty area, a geographic field, a geometric condition. Place indicates a particular location, which is necessarily socially defined. As Keith Basso noted, "For any cultural system, what counts as 'place' is an empirical question that must be answered ethnographically" (1996:159). His book Wisdom Sits in Places (1996) demonstrates the ways in which places are also "spatial conceptions of history," citing Vine Deloria Jr. (34). As such, a sense of place is deeply associated with both perceptions of the past and a sense of self or of individual identity (35).
Several border researchers have emphasized the way that people at the border narrate their identities by constructing a sense of difference between themselves and other groups and places. For example, Peter Sahlins (1989) describes the creation of the international boundary between France and Spain in the Pyrenees as a product of local imaginaries, rather than as an imposition from a distant center. Alan M. Klein (1997) documents the demise of a shared baseball team on the U.S.-Mexico border, due in large part to the constant contrasts that community residents drew between the two nations and Los Dos Laredos. Pablo Vila (2000) explicitly examines the narratives of border residents in El Paso-Ciudad Juarez, demonstrating how people use social categories to reinforce borders and define their own identities. He documents the importance of place, or region, in the construction of identity for people from Juarez, in contrast to the racial or ethnic constructions used by those from El Paso (21). My research echoes these approaches in many ways, particularly in the attention paid to difference, and reveals that the transformation of place and the ways in which people imagine place, in both Douglas and Agua Prieta, has profound influences on the ways in which people imagine themselves and thus define social identities.
Community members defined Douglas in three distinct ways, depending on the context. Each definition implicates different meanings for social behavior, differing economic bases and thus relations to the means of production, and differing boundaries for the community itself. Douglas was always three things for residents: border town, small town, and company town. (1) Douglas residents are acutely aware of the ways in which their city has transformed since its founding. This article explores the effects of community-wide changes on the ways people construct social divisions and thereby construct identity. Rather than focusing explicitly on such aspects of identity as class or ethnicity, which are certainly meaningful to both locals and anthropologists, I examine the processes by which people create, change, and maintain social positions. The context of changing definitions of place allows the exploration of factors like length of residence, attitudes towards immigrants, and transnational interaction. These behaviors and mindsets in turn reveal much about ethnicity and class.
People in the community consistently mentioned three major changes that have had dramatic effects on their daily lives. In 1991, the two smokestacks of the Douglas copper smelter were demolished and Phelps Dodge, a major copper-producing corporation, left the community that was founded to serve its industrial needs. This abandonment and the closing of the smelter profoundly affected the fives of those who stayed in Douglas. The other two changes discussed regularly by locals both were generated by migration. Douglas-Agua Prieta has become an extremely busy crossing point for undocumented immigrants leaving Mexico for jobs in the United States. Across the border in Agua Prieta, businesses catering to migrants, like restaurants and hotels, have flourished. Agua Prieta, like so many Mexican border cities, has experienced a population boom since 1960, as migrants from other parts of Sonora and the interior of Mexico have come to work in the maquiladora industry, assembly plants in Mexico that are subsidiaries or subcontractors of multinational corporations. As Agua Prieta went from a small community to an urban center, Douglas residents changed their relationship with their sister city. All of these events--the closing of the smelter, increased undocumented immigration, and the population increase in Agua Prieta--have impacted identities in Douglas.
WHEN THE COMPANY LEAVES THE COMPANY TOWN
When Douglas was founded in 1901, the city was designed with the needs of an industrial economy in mind. The place that is Douglas was produced within a context of power relations. An economically powerful company, Phelps Dodge (often called P. D. by locals), desired a city on the U.S.-Mexico border that encompassed certain natural resources, namely, water and a relatively low elevation, suitable for a copper smelter (see map in figure 1). Another community, Naco, could have been developed only a few miles west, but powerful individuals would not have gained as much in that case. Elite American men, those associated with the company and their friends, arranged to stake claims to land from which they could benefit the most (Heyman 1995:160). Of course, this land was available because of prior political and military machinations that disenfranchised both Native Americans and Mexicans.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The very name of the community, that of the former president of Phelps Dodge, reflects the power structure that shaped the new town. Like Bisbee, named for a mining magnate's attorney (Sheridan 1995:164), the name obscures any reference to a past that included Apache, Spanish, and Mexican occupation. The name is consistent with the colonialist practice of renaming the landscape, remarked upon by numerous scholars (see Anderson 1983; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Hill 2004), and can be seen again in the transformation of the water source called Agua Prieta into Whitewater Draw. Thus, the stamp of U.S. copper mining remains long after the mines and the smelter have closed.
The echoes of that power structure continue to resonate, although those who live in the community today have begun to shift the social structure in response to the vacancies created by the departure of Phelps Dodge. In contrast, Phelps Dodge remains a powerful multinational corporation with operations on several continents, and no remnants of their involvement in Douglas are evident in their public statements on community involvement. Even more surprising, their public statement on their history mentions neither Douglas nor Bisbee. Phelps Dodge has been able to shed its relationship with the area, while Bisbee and Douglas retain a connection to the industrial power through their names, architecture, and the life histories of residents.
Residents often reminisce about the good years, when Phelps Dodge employed many people at the smelter and brought money to the community. Nonetheless, many documents record that the good years were brief, interspersed with depressions, layoffs, and strikes. Even as early as 1951, a student of history wrote, "If optimism exists at all today in Douglas, it is tempered by many past disappointments and a pretty definite acknowledgement of future limitations" (Jeffrey 1951:124). In fact, peak production for the smelters was achieved in 1918 (110). World War I brought a boom to the copper economy, but the early 1920s saw a depression so severe that the smelters closed for nine months (Heyman 1991:32).
World War II again brought expansion to the mines and smelters from 1937 through 1945. Indeed, labor shortages became a problem, and Phelps Dodge turned to Mexico for a solution (Jeffrey 1951:121). When the war ended, demand for copper decreased, driving prices and wages down. Dissatisfaction about wages led to a three-month strike in 1946, followed by another in 1949 and yet another in 1959. A major strike in 1983, including not just Bisbee and Douglas, but also other Phelps Dodge communities in Arizona, resulted after workers agreed to freeze their wages but asked for cost-of-living protection, which Phelps Dodge refused (Sheridan 1995:324). In 1987, Phelps Dodge closed the Douglas smelter permanently.
The strikes figure prominently in the memories of some adult residents today, particularly Mexican Americans. Many have strong family ties to California and New Mexico because of the need for work when the smelters closed. One woman, whose grandparents had moved to Douglas from Sonora in the 1920s, recalled her family and others moving due to the strikes when she was young, as well as the discrimination against Mexican-origin workers that was reflected in wages and working conditions at Phelps Dodge.
Mina: (2) My stepfather was a wonderful person. He was a hard worker. He was a miner here at Phelps Dodge.... I guess a lot of the time that I spent with my grandparents [in Douglas] was because, when they went on strike, the whole family would...
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