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Holding the Line
Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
Barbara Kingsolver
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eBook - ePub
Holding the Line
Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
Barbara Kingsolver
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About This Book
Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters.
Hundreds of families held the line in the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge Copper in Arizona. After more than a year the strikers lost their union certification, but the battle permanently altered the social order in these small, predominantly Hispanic mining towns. At the time the strike began, many women said they couldn't leave the house without their husband's permission. Yet, when injunctions barred union men from picketing, their wives and daughters turned out for the daily picket lines. When the strike dragged on and men left to seek jobs elsewhere, women continued to picket, organize support, and defend their rights even when the towns were occupied by the National Guard. "Nothing can ever be the same as it was before, " said Diane McCormick of the Morenci Miners Women's Auxiliary. "Look at us. At the beginning of this strike, we were just a bunch of ladies."
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1
The Devilâs Domain
Flossie Navarro is a sturdy woman, strong-boned and handsome, with a lightness in her bearing that has stood up to some seventy years of a rock-hard life. Those years have neither dulled her mind nor dented her will. She says she isnât leaving Clifton, Arizonaânot now, and not ever. There has been talk of moving people out, but she and her husband Ed are permanently settled here in their weathered-white frame house on the floodplain of the San Francisco River.
But back in 1944 when she left her familyâs farm in Arkansas and struck out for Arizona, Flossie was footloose and on her own. Sheâd heard that the copper mines out west were hiring women to keep the smelter fires burning while the men were off fighting World War II. The rumors proved true: the Phelps Dodge Mining Company promptly hired her on at the mine of her choice. She chose the Morenci pit at Clifton, with a trace of lingering homesicknessâsheâd asked, and was told that of all the Arizona mines this one was the closest to Arkansas.
The next day she embarked on the career of her life. âI did anything,â she says. âIâd get a shovel and shovel, push a wheelbarrow, load that wheelbarrow and dump it on a belt, whatever they said. I was raised on a farm, and we girls did everything there was to do on a farm, but not necessarily like that. It was hard work, and when we went to the bucket room where they run the samples, it was extra-hard work. Weâd have to stand and collect mud and water and put it in a bucket for eight hours straight. On our shift it was all women, except for the floorwalkers.â A floorwalker, according to Flossie, is a man who ânoses around and sees what he can find out to go tell on people to get them in trouble.â These were the only men she ever saw in the concentrator and the ball mill. She declares simply, âThose women kept that mine going.â
Even so, the women who walked to work every morning in their coveralls, hairnets, and hard hats, telling jokes and swinging their lunch buckets, were tugging at the moorings of the status quo. Clifton was a traditional Catholic town where a womanâs world was quietly, immutably defined by the walls of her home. Those who worked in the mine were considered unwomanly at best-and at worst, unladylike. Some people hinted they were prostitutes. This didnât slow Flossie down. âWell, sure, the men would call you a nasty name, but youâd learn how to call them one back and go ahead. I always said if I wanted to go and do such things I would sure find a nicer place to do them than in the muck and the water on that ball mill floor!â
Janie Ramon in a sailor-striped T-shirt is not the first thing that comes to mind when you picture a miner. She is small and compact, with long dark hair and a cheerfully defiant disposition. She was hired at the Ajo mine in 1973, after a union-backed lawsuit forced the company to accept applications from womenâthis time without a declaration of war. It was nonetheless a battle: many women say they had their applications in the Phelps Dodge office for years without acknowledgment. It took most of them more than a decade to make their way into skilled jobs in the Phelps Dodge mines. But they had families to support, and the mining towns offer a woman little else in the way of financial security: car-hop jobs at the Sonic Burger, work at the laundromat, a handful of secretarial positions at the courthouse. Some women, desperate or brave, saw no choice but to hold out for work in the mine.
Janie was twenty years old when her father died in a car accident. Her familyâs security went with him to the grave, and so did her college career. She took a deep breath and applied herself to becoming a miner. Janie was the first woman ever hired at Ajo, as far as she knows, and she says without hesitation that it was terrible. She was shuffled around like a wild card and harassed without mercy. âThey didnât really know what to do with me. They asked if I would mop floors and clean bathrooms, which I did.â Eventually she landed in the paint shop.
The following year, ten other women joined Janie at the Ajo pit. One of them, Betty Copeland, weighed ninety-two pounds when she was hired as a laborer. While many men gave her a hard time. she found that some of her male co-workers were at first surprisingly encouraging. Eventually her father told her why. The men had placed bets on whether or not she would last two weeks. Most of them lost money; ten years later. Betty still hadnât quit.
Jean Lopez immediately described herself to me as ânobody really, just a mom.â Sheâs youthful-looking to be the mother of teenagers. Sheâs also outgoing, articulate, and a far cry from ânobody really.â
Jean spent her entire childhood in sight of the smokestacks of the Morenci smelter. Her grandfather Brigham Hernandez fought to get the Mine-Mill union in Morenci; before that, he was railroaded out of Bisbee in the ruthless 1917 deportation. Jean heard these stories from her father, a miner whoâs now retired. âThe thing that really sticks in my mind about growing up here,â she said, âis that every three years there was a strike. Every three years. We had to make sacrifices to keep going. We were a family of six, and they didnât make much money at that time.
âThis was just part of lifeâlife in a mining town. After the strike would end, my family would start planning for the next one. When another strike was coming up, we knew we would be eating beans and tortillas again for as long as it would take. It didnât really bother us. My memories of all that are not bad. I admire my father, never being a scab, never even thinking of it. The unions were tight here. Almost everybody in the area was raised that way.
âIt wasnât until I got married that I really understood the importance of a union. I married a miner, of course. He and I went to high school together. My husband was also born and raised hereâhis father worked for the company, and his grandfather; it goes on and on and on. So after we got married, then I was in charge of the finances. I would ask my mother, 'God, how did you make it?â I only had one kid thenâsheâd had four! And sheâd say, 'Well, you know God will never let you die of hunger. But you have to have the guts to stand up for what you believe.â â
The strike of â83 turned out to be in every way more difficult than any Jean had known before. She stood up for what she believed, and it cost her plenty. She canât imagine having done otherwise.
Women have no business with a mineâthey lack the muscle and moral fiber needed for the job. That belief is the strange cornerstone of many a mining tale, including this one, a story of women who spent two years on a picket line holding together the body and soul of a strike. There were a few dozen of them, or a few hundred, depending on how you countâat any rate, there were enough.
The story could begin on any one of a thousand days. One is June 30, 1983. The minerâs contract was ticking like a bomb, set to expire at midnight. The unions had been working for weeks to reach a settlement with all five of Arizonaâs copper-producing companies. Miners knew very well that times werenât good for copper, so they offered what they felt they could give: frozen wages for the duration of the next three-year contract, provided they would still get cost-of-living protection tied to the consumer price index. Four of the companies involvedâKennecott, Asarco, Magma Copper, and Inspiration Consolidatedâsettled with little delay. The fifth, Phelps Dodge, refused the offer and asked workers to take further cuts in wage scales, benefits. holiday and vacation time, and an end to cost-of-living protection. This was less than the workers could live with. At one minute after midnight on July 1, Phelps Dodge employees at the Morenci, Ajo, Bisbee, and Douglas mines walked off their jobs. The normal cacophony of mining and smelting noises went dead still. Outside in the hot desert night, supporters waited along the road to clap and cheer as the strikers trailed away from the mine gates in a long caravan of cars and pickup trucks.
But Phelps Dodge didnât intend to let its operations close down. And so the fight began, with every action inciting an oppositeânot necessarily equalâreaction. When the company began bringing in replacement workers, striking miners lined up at the gates in protest. When Phelps Dodge won a court injunction barring the miners from assembling at the gates, women supporters called mass pickets of their own. When the Womenâs Auxiliary was also barred from the line, they changed their name and increased their numbers. When the National Guard and riot troops from Arizonaâs Department of Public Safety (DPS) rolled in to occupy Clifton and Morenci, no one imagined the strike could last much longer. The women organized rallies, pickets, and more rallies. They were tear-gassed and arrested. They swore and screamed and sometimes threw rocks, and always they showed up for the picket. Thirteen months later, when they were still on the line, a DPS officer remarked in what was to become the most famous summation of the strike, âIf we could just get rid of these broads, weâd have it made.â
Fina Roman, president of the Morenci Miners Womenâs Auxiliary, called a meeting to respond to this statement. âTheyâll never be rid of us,â she declared with controlled anger. âDo they ask us to forget the elderly being tear-gassed? Do they ask us to forget the beatings and arrests? To forget the past generations who handed down a sacred trust to preserve a dignified way of life won through tremendous sacrifices? Do they ask us to give this up without a fight?â
In fact most onlookers did expect a quiet surrender. They underestimated the stakes. The âsacred trust,â as Fina called it, is not an easy thing for outsiders to understand. It occupies a different dimension from wages and benefits: it is family history, honor, a promise never yet broken. Its value is measured by the risk mining families took to defend it, for a strike means putting earnings, possessions, friendships, and sometimes lives on the line. Mining history is bound together with a long chain of strike martyrs and an even longer chain of bereaved families left behind to fight for their daily bread.
When a strike erupts into external drama, news hounds swarm like moths to the flame: testy standoffs, brandished weapons, a trickle of bloodâgreat copy. But in the shadow, ignored by all voyeurs, are the family stories and tedious losses that constitute a strike. The paycheck stops coming and thereâs no guarantee of when, or if, it will resume. The sofa is repossessed, and then the station wagon. The mail carrier who used to bring birthday cards and happy news is now a dreaded harbinger of shutoff notices, foreclosures, and eviction papers. Childrenâs outgrown school clothes arenât replaced, and their birthdays pass without presents. There is little glamour in impoverished lives.
If it were your family, would you do it? In the last nights before a contract expires, between tears, prayers, spousal rage, or eyes locked in promise, the decision gets made, one anxious household at a time. Never lightly. Anyone who thinks of a strike as a simple gamble on big money has never been through one, or near it. Mainstream news media generally manage to create a caricature of strikers that associates the words âoverpaidâ and âgreedyâ with âlabor,â as surely as Florida has oranges and Arabs have oil. But wages are often secondary to considerations like workplace safety and medical benefits. (Sometimes, as in the case of the air traffic controllersâ strike, at issue are working conditions that affect the public safety.) In recent years especially, strikes in the United States have not been to demand more money but rather to resist drastic cuts.
Five days into the Arizona strike, the stateâs largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic, pronounced its judgment: Gone are the days, its editorial page declared, âwhen labor could get away with bloated agreements that merely passed along the costs of lower productivity, higher wages and golden fringe benefits to the captive and unquestioning U.S. marketâŠ. Jobless Butte [Montana) miners undoubtedly would be very happy to accept what Phelps Dodgeâs miners have refused.â Most of the Republicâs white-collar readers probably agreed with this assessment: as long as someone, somewhere, is willing to settle for less than a union wage, organized workers have no right to do otherwise. Why should a guy who hauls rock get paid as much as I do?
That is probably a question best answered by a rock-hauling guy who is missing a limb or half his lung. But at that moment it wasnât even the point. In the media fanfare that attended the strikeâs beginning, it was virtually impossible to find in print the actual terms of the rejected contractâor the fact that Phelps Dodge miners had already volunteered to freeze their wages.
If the issue were only money, this strike would have ended before it began. Instead, it lasted through two scorched Arizona summers; some seventy-odd Fridays without paychecks; one Christmas without presents, and then another; a hundred-year flood. The question became not so much What will they do next? but rather, Why on earth are they doing it? Why did a crew of women declare their essential weakness while planting themselves like rocks in the road of a hell-bent anti-union corporation? When homeroom mothers take up sticks and stones, when church choir sopranos grow scandalously foul tongues, when a small tribe of housewives provide for a legion of families on government surplus cheese and thin air, it seems that anything could happen. Most of this story is the matter of what they did and how they did it, but first of all itâs important to understand why. There is no hope of deciphering this social alchemy without looking at it with a slanted eye through the spectacles of history.
The story could begin on the day Flossie Navarro sashayed into the mine on the wind of World War II. Or it could begin much earlier than that. In every season since the earthâs face was opened for dredging, women have worked in mines and they have fought for the safety and survival of miners. And always, it wasnât exactly supposed to be that way. The hostility Flossie stirred as a miner still persists in Arizonaâs copper pits, and is a tradition probably as old as mining itself, rooted in the mineral-rich soils of the Andes where the Incas opened mines before European ships ever touched the Americasâ shores. The keepers of these ancient Andean mines in the Bolivian altiplano have always described their world as two separate domains: one above ground, and one underneath. A benevolent, matronly earth goddess oversees growing crops and family life. But the stony underground world carved out by miners seeking copper, tin, and silverâthat is the devilâs domain.
This devilâs name is Supay, and he has ruled minersâ lives from underneath their floors since before the Spanish conquest. When the mine shafts rumble and threaten to collapse, Bolivian miners assume it is Supay begrudging the ore they tap, little by little, from his glittering black veins. In the heart of Boliviaâs mountainous mining region, the mining town of Oruro was the ancient ceremonial center for the Incas. High priests claimed to travel from Peru through tunnels, passing secretly under the core of the Andes, and in full ceremonial dress they leaped out of the ground in Oruro. Now the tunnelâs mouth is blocked with boulders, but festivals still celebrate the powers of Supay. During the week of Carnival, Devil Dancers in red-tipped shoes and homed masks jam the streets in a wild pro...