Research That Changes the World

“Devil’s Backbone: Angela Garcia’s New Research on a Disappeared New Mexican Mining Community”

This year, I launched a new ethnographic and archival project centered on Santa Rita del Cobre, a once-vibrant mining community near Silver City, New Mexico, that no longer exists. In its place is an open-pit mine two miles wide and 1,500 feet deep—a gaping hole that stands as material witness to over a century of extraction, racial dispossession, and ecological destruction. The project, titled Devil’s Backbone: The Expansion and Erasure of a New Mexican Mining Community, asks a deceptively simple question: What is it to live in the tatters of a former life? In pursuing that question through ethnographic and archival methods, I open a window onto a history largely overlooked and onto problems that sit at the heart of contemporary anthropological debates about capitalism, race, and the environment.

The project focuses on Espinazo del Diablo—Devil’s Backbone—the name residents gave to the Mexican and Mexican-American side of a rigidly segregated settlement organized by the Chino Copper Company beginning in 1910. Anglo workers and their families were housed on the western side of town, near company-built amenities that were explicitly whites-only: newly constructed houses, schools, a hospital, a Protestant church, a company store, a theatre. The Chino corporation advertised these amenities to attract Anglo workers to what it framed as an isolated, implicitly threatening Mexican settlement—a rhetorical move that neatly obscured the fact that its pro its depended on the labor of the Mexican and Mexican-American workers it was simultaneously rendering invisible.

Those workers and their families lived in “Mexican Town.” They endured lower wages, more dangerous conditions, and the cumulative bodily toll of environmental toxins. They also built—in spite of all this, and in many ways because of it—a tight-knit community centered on a Catholic church. The church sat on a rise overlooking the pit, so that parishioners leaving Sunday mass were confronted, week after week, with the narrowing distance between their neighborhood and the expanding mine. They called their neighborhood Devil’s Backbone as a reference to the low-paying, back-breaking work the mine offered—a name that carries both the weight of endurance and a dry, defiant humor.

Through the 1950s, Santa Rita del Cobre had a population of over 6,000 people. The pit’s expansion consumed the settlement gradually and unevenly. Anglo neighborhoods, positioned atop the richest ore deposits, were engulfed first; their residents were relocated by the corporation to nearby towns. Devil’s Backbone remained standing the longest, and when the end came, its residents were offered far less support or recompense. What was consumed was not only ground but a world—a neighborhood, a parish, a web of kinship and mutual care that had accumulated over generations precisely in the shadow of its own destruction.