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  • Santa Rita del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico by Christopher J. Huggard and Terrence M. Humble
  • Robert L. Spude (bio)
Santa Rita del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico. By Christopher J. Huggard and Terrence M. Humble. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012. Pp. vxi+252. $45.

The copper of Santa Rita del Cobre has been mined for over two centuries, the longest record of any western mining region. Discovered in the eighteenth century and opened under a Spanish colonial mineral grant, the property is best known by mining historians as one of the "Jackling properties," the Chino open-pit operation begun early in the twentieth century.

Once a little-known district on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in the southwest corner of New Mexico, by the twenty-first century the Santa Rita had produced more copper than all of the mines of Michigan's famed Keweenaw district combined.

The combination of the talents of a historian and a long-time resident miner greatly enhances this history. Mining historian Christoper Huggard of Northwest Arkansas Community College wrote his dissertation on the [End Page 410] region while at the University of New Mexico. At that time he met Terrence Humble, a mine company worker with a keen sense of history who had collected invaluable records, photographs, and other ephemera, as well as copies of original Spanish and Mexican period documents. Their collaboration has produced a well-written and illustrated history that captures the primary themes of discovery and colonialism, mining technology, corporate organization, labor, and environmental impacts, as well as the personal story of a people and a community.

The first period at Santa Rita includes its discovery during the Napoleonic Wars, Spain's demand for copper, and the grant to Chihuahua City merchants to extract the mineral while surviving repeated conflicts with native peoples. By 1810, Santa Rita del Cobre was an important community on New Spain's northern frontier. The Mexican and early American period also oscillated between the shocks of Apache raids and those of American freebooters. During this time, sporadic operations would thrive then collapse due to periodic warfare. After the 1848 American takeover, Texas investors, with Chihuahuan miners and German metallurgists, reopened the region as America's second-largest producer of copper, only to collapse again with the Civil War, when a Confederate invasion of New Mexico was followed by Union reprisals.

The remainder of the nineteenth century saw continued operations, with a duplicitous maneuver by the politically connected Santa Fe Ring to gain control of the deposit and then sell to Boston investors. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Santa Rita operation awed investors with its extent and promise, but failed to meet expectations with the technology of the time. That would change early in the twentieth century when a young engineer named John M. Sully received backing and support, especially by Daniel C. Jackling, to create a large-scale open-pit operation under the Chino Copper Company—formed in 1909—one of the great porphyry copper operations of the twentieth-century West. After the Guggenheims consolidated their control of Chino in 1933, it became an operating unit of Kennecott Copper, the international conglomerate.

Huggard and Humble detail not just the mine and technology, but the labor pool, union activities, and the development of community. Because of the proximity of Mexico and the continued cross-border connections, Santa Rita has always been a predominantly Hispanic community. Large numbers of southern European immigrants added to the ethnic diversity during the first half of the twentieth century. This community and its religious, educational, family, and organizational activities are described well, one of the many strengths of the book. Mid-twentieth-century labor activities are also covered in detail, especially the post-World War II labor unrest that, among other things, led to the making of the blacklisted 1954 movie The Salt of the Earth. By 1970, the Chino open-pit expansion caused the removal of all the buildings at Santa Rita, its physical presence obliterated and its people and [End Page 411] their community dispersed. Today, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, Inc., continues the tradition of mining and milling at...

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