Bisbee '17 by Davis Guggenheim, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jonathan Silberberg, and Nicole Scott (review)

Utilizing elements of several genres, including documentary filmmaking and historical reenactment, Robert Greene weaves a nuanced narrative in Bisbee '17, revealing an episode in Arizona's history that many would rather forget in a town adept at keeping secrets. Filmed on the hundredth anniversary of the Bisbee Deportation, which took place July 12, 1917, Bisbee '17 opens with an introduction that sets the stage for the conflict. The United States had just entered World War I; the copper mined from vast holdings of the Phelps Dodge Corporation in and around Bisbee was vital to the war effort. While the mines were profiting, labor unrest loomed.

Located just seven miles from the border with Mexico, the population of Bisbee was—and is—diverse, with thirty-four nationalities represented at the time of the deportation. Bisbee was the richest community in the state, though not everyone benefited equally: compared to their Anglo counterparts, Eastern European and Latinx immigrants generally received lower wages, experienced poorer treatment, and were given the most dangerous jobs in the mines. Many of the miners were therefore receptive when the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) came to Bisbee to organize a strike. That strike forever altered the lives of everyone involved.

On June 24, 1917, Phelps Dodge refused all of the demands of the workers; within three days, half of the miners had walked off the job. Tensions escalated over the next two weeks; rumors circulated that the IWW had been infiltrated by German supporters who had planted weapons and dynamite in town, creating an environment of fear and distrust. The mining company took matters into its own hands, with the help of Cochise County sheriff, Henry Wheeler, who recruited and deputized nearly two thousand (white) men in a plot to break the strike and destroy organized labor in Bisbee.

Shortly after dawn on July 12, Wheeler and his legion of deputies rounded up roughly 1,200 striking workers, separating them from their families. Given the chance to return to work, most declined. The sheriff's posse then herded 1,196 men (90 percent of them born outside the United States) into the cars with no food or water and transported them over two hundred miles into the New Mexico desert east of Columbus, where they were told never to return to Bisbee under threat of being killed. In the days following the deportation company officials shaped the narrative, ultimately preventing the story from being told for decades. Nobody was ever convicted of any wrongdoing.

The hundredth anniversary of the deportation in 2017 presented an opportunity for a reckoning; director Robert Greene provided a forum and a format. Employing local citizens as amateur actors, and Katherine Benton-Cohen, renowned historian of the Arizona borderlands and author of Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2009), as a consultant, Greene created a film that is equal parts history and art. He presents both sides of a story which clearly divides the town a century later.

The victors who remained in Bisbee following the deportation were left to narrate the events of that summer. Many felt justified, citing the Law of Necessity and arguing that their actions were necessary for defense against greater evils—communism, socialism, and anarchy. Passed down over generations, that narrative was recited by some of the actors in the film whose families had been involved in orchestrating the deportation.

Greene asked the actors to take on the stance of a character from 1917, a task that proved unsettlingly easy for some. Actors either defended their ancestors or positioned themselves as neutral, saying that they could see both sides. The line between acting and expression of true feelings is blurred; some people assert their ancestors had been villainized and demonized for doing what they truly believed was right at the time—to preserve Bisbee, save human lives, and support the nation in...