Barbara Kingsolver on the Women of the Great Arizona Mine Strike

My mission was to cover the Phelps Dodge mine strike for several news publications: Get the story, meet the deadline, earn my daily bread.

I spent a lot of that summer wearing the tread off my tires. I was driving a dirt-tan Nissan pickup truck. I’d never paid much mind to brand names until I arrived in the blue-collar outpost of a mining town where the credo “buy American” is no platitude, but food on the plate. The first time I parked on the main thoroughfare of Clifton, summoned my reporter’s nerve, and crossed the pot-holed street to talk with a gang of men outside the Steelworkers’ Hall, they looked me up and down and asked if I belonged to that little Japanese truck. I replied defensively that it was put together at a plant in Tennessee. I deeply hoped I’d said the right thing. The men gave terse answers to my careful questions about strike negotiations, but gave no indication they approved of me or my foreign transport.

Two weeks later I was in the Clifton area again, talking to some picketers near the mine’s main gate. I knew nobody in this town before the strike. I’d never had reason to set foot there. During a pause in the interview while I struggled to take cogent notes, a young man yelled from across the street that nobody ought to be coming around here in a Japanese truck. Two others in the crowd, people I did not know from Adam, turned to him and declared, “It was made in Tennessee.”

By summer’s end it was not just my truck getting recognized protectively in Clifton. I was now known high and low as “that gal that’s writing the book about us.” Nobody could have been more surprised to hear it than me. I had never told my interviewees I was writing a book, only that I was interested in their story, which was growing increasingly shocking and remarkable, and that I wanted the whole world to hear the truth. Newspaper work restrained me to a word limit, so I’d been thinking of truth in small doses. But the good citizens of Clifton apparently knew that Truth can’t be confined. Never mind that I had no idea how to go about writing a book, no publishing contacts, nor an iota of confidence that I could carry out such a grand project. My truck was from Tennessee, and I was writing a book.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this. I spent my whole childhood in a town roughly the size of Clifton; it hid in other foothills at the opposite end of the continent, but the rules of small-town life are fairly assiduous. Rule One is that nobody stays a stranger very long. A newcomer has two options: become known, or else become a Stranger, a specific identity earned by purposeful disinterest. A journalist is supposed to be exactly that kind of stranger—an outsider who holds no attachment to her subjects. But I came back to these little towns too often to remain invisible, and cared too much in the long run to pretend I didn’t. Clifton declared me the biographer of a place and time, the one who would carry out a package big enough to hold Truth. If the shoes didn’t quite fit, no others were offered. And so I put them on.

This is a story of a dramatic copper mine strike. The conflict lasted roughly 18 months, between June 1983 and December 1984. It appeared to be an important moment in U.S. labor history, and the decades that have passed since then has proven, indeed, that it was. But it was also an important moment for the people involved, women and men with homes and neighbors and children and hopes rooted in the here and now, all of which were torn asunder and replanted in a new way, to face a new source of light. Dramatic events in the United States routinely cause heads to tum, momentarily, before all eyes turn back to the business at hand. But the Phelps Dodge strike in Arizona was an event that forced a genuine turning point in many lives at once.

When it began, nearly everyone believed it would be a brief and conventional strike. Within a month, events had turned in a way I’d never seen before, nor heard of happening in my lifetime. These were the kinds of things that aren’t supposed to occur in the land of the First Amendment: People were being jailed for infractions no larger than picking up the phone and calling a neighbor “scab.” Helicopters and squads of armored men with tear gas and large automatic weapons were storming tiny, bucolic Main Streets, and strike supporters were claiming their right to hold the line with extraordinary resistance.

The faces and hands of this resistance mostly belonged to women. Who among us with blood in his veins could pretend disinterest? This strike was not merely fascinating; as far as I was concerned it also looked terrifying, and it looked like history.

For the next year and a half I did my best to watch it happen. Some half-dozen mining towns were involved, but the locus of the strike over the long haul was at the Morenci mine, up the hill from Clifton. A second focal point, especially in the beginning, was the Ajo mine. Ajo lies two hours by narrow paved road to the west of Tucson; Morenci is three hours northeast. I wore out one set of tires and put another on my erstwhile foreign truck.

I taped long interviews with some 75 people, mostly women, who lived and marched in the line of fire. Most of the interviews were not completed in one sitting but, rather, would leave off when our time was up and begin again breathlessly a few weeks later, continuing in this manner over the course of more than a year. And so these were not exactly interviews, it turned out, but a sort of community journal spoken aloud.

I tracked my subjects’ changes of heart and mind as they held the line with their hearts in their throats. I stood with them, embarrassed, as they cried out to a wide world that either refused to believe what was happening to them, or didn’t care, or simply could not know. While I watched and listened, they forged new selves.

I listened for more than a year to the stories of striking miners and their stunningly courageous wives, sisters, daughters. Sometimes I had to visit them in jail. They suffered outrageous injustices. As a witness I was forced, almost against my will, to become a smarter, more sympathetic human being. I saw rights I’d taken for granted denied to people I’d learned to care about. I came away with a heart deeply cautioned against the great American tradition of condemning the accused.

Whether or not you can claim any interest in a gritty little town smack in the middle of nowhere that hosted a long-ago mine strike, I hope in the end you will care about its courage and sagacity. This story is not precisely about the mine strike of 1983, and not at all about copper. It is, I think, about sparks that fly when the flint of force strikes against human mettle.

Flossie Navarro is a sturdy woman, strong-boned and handsome, with a lightness in her bearing that has stood up to some 70 years of a rock-hard life. Those years have neither dulled her mind nor dented her will. She says she isn’t leaving Clifton, Arizona—not 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 family’s farm in Arkansas and struck out for Arizona, Flossie was footloose and on her own. She’d 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 home-sickness, she’d 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. “I did anything,” she says:

I’d 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. We’d 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.

A floorwalker, according to Flossie, is a man who “noses around and sees what he can find out to go tell on people to get them in trouble.” These were the only men she ever saw in the concentrator and the ball mill. She declares simply, “Those women kept that mine going.” 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 woman’s 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 didn’t slow Flossie down. “Well, sure, the men would call you a nasty name, but you’d 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!”

Jean Lopez immediately described herself to me as “nobody really, just a mom.” She’s youthful-looking to be the mother of teenagers. She’s also outgoing, articulate and a far cry from “nobody really.”

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 who’s now retired.

The thing that really sticks in my mind about growing up here is 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 didn’t make much money at that time.

This was just part of life-life 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 didn’t 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.

It wasn’t 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 here—his father worked for the company, and his grandfather; it goes on and on and on. So after we got married, then was in charge of the finances. I would ask my mother, “God, how did you make it?” I only had one kid then-she’d had four! And she’d 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.”

The strike of ’83 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 can’t imagine having done otherwise.

Women have no business with a mine—they 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 count—at any rate, there were enough.

The story could begin on any one of a thousand days. One is June 30, 1983. The miner’s 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 Arizona’s copper-producing companies. Miners knew very well that times weren’t 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 involved—Kennecott, Asarco, Magma Copper, and Inspiration Consolidated—settled 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 didn’t intend to let its operations close down. And so the fight began, with every action inciting an opposite-not-necessarily-equal-reaction. 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 Women’s Auxiliary was also barred from the line, they changed their name and increased their numbers. When the National Guard and riot troops from Arizona’s 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, “If we could just get rid of these broads, we’d have it made.”

Fina Roman, president of the Morenci Miners Women’s Auxiliary, called a meeting to respond to this statement. She declared with controlled anger:

They’ll never be rid of us. Do 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?

In fact most onlookers did expect a quiet surrender. They underestimated the stakes. The “sacred trust,” 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 blood-great 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 there’s 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. Children’s outgrown school clothes aren’t 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 “overpaid” and “greedy” with “labor,” 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 controllers’ 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 state’s largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic, pronounced its judgment: Gone are the days, its editorial page declared:

[W]hen 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. market. Jobless Butte [Montana] miners undoubtedly would be very happy to accept what Phelps Dodge’s miners have refused.

Most of the Republic’s 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 wasn’t even the point. In the media fanfare that attended the strike’s beginning, it was virtually impossible to find in print the actual terms of the rejected contract—or 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 70-odd Fridays without paychecks; one Christmas without presents, and then another; a 100-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 it’s 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 earth’s face was opened for dredging, women have worked in mines and they have fought for the safety and survival of miners. And always, it wasn’t exactly supposed to be that way.

The open pit mine in Morenci, Arizona, a steadily grazing herd of mechanized shovels raises a yellow haze of fine dust. This is the most productive copper mine in North America. In the best of years it has yielded nearly 300,000 tons of metal; clearly this is the domain of both devil and dollar.

The copper smelter’s two smokestacks rise like a pair of giant horns out of the mountain’s granite pate. Below the homed promontory lies the pit. The earth’s entrails are laid open there in a pattern of descending steps that expose the strange, delicate colors of a mountain’s insides: lavender, pink, blue-gray. If the miners labor here in the belly of a beast, gutting it more deeply every day, then that beast is as tough as Prometheus, the thief in Greek mythology whose punishment was to be disemboweled every day for eternity. Morenci’s miners—grandfathers, fathers and sons—have worked this same scarred landscape for more than half a century.

Around the mine and in the river valley below it lie the ordinary mining towns of Morenci and Clifton. Each of the two small towns has its high school, its main drag, its dust-coated bouquet of blinking neon signs, its sundry handful of bars and drive-in restaurants. No devil dances for Carnival in these streets, but even so, the germinal social order of Supay’s domain seems to hold sway over all that has come after. A mine is a masculine enclave, not just in the Andes—the exact same social prescriptions surface wherever the earth is scratched.

Flossie Navarro heard constantly that female workers would jinx the mine. When women began working the Appalachian coal mines in the late 1970s, they confronted a centuries-old folk belief that a woman underground was bad luck and could cause a cave-in merely by her presence.

Who could blame miners for an excessive interest in bad luck? With or without a woman’s presence, to mine ore is to flirt with disaster. Between 1961 and 1973, for example—years when most of us held an anxious eye on a perilous occupation overseas—more than half a million disabling injuries happened in U.S. mines. That’s nearly twice as many as befell all U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. The mean death rate for miners during those years was approximately 1,080 per million, and for active-duty personnel, about 1,270 per million. (These figures are from the National Safety Council and Department of Defense Information, respectively).

If war is hell, so is mining: underground shafts collapse, smelter furnaces explode, lung disease is endemic. In few other professions are the odds so stacked against living long enough to retire.

It might be tempting to blame the Devil or a woman, but these poor odds aren’t so much laws of nature as of economics. Most cave-ins could be prevented with enough supporting timbers. Extra drying time will keep damp ore from exploding in a furnace. But every penny spent on precaution is a penny robbed from the business of mining ore. Safety costs money; speedy production costs lives.

It’s a familiar formula that has never yet been solved by cool algebra. Obviously, miners have a strong interest in their side of the equation and have forever sought to organize for better working conditions, longer lives and better-fed children—and this, too, is a history punctuated by disaster. Every country that has tapped its mineral wealth has accumulated grisly stories of strikes, repression and massacres.

In our passion to touch and retouch the past, we often create a history that polishes the marble surface of events to a bright shine and ignores the mortar that holds the wall in place.

The contributions of women to mining history are mostly invisible, but they are a good part of the reason the wall still stands. Of the multitude of woman-led strikes that have to be taken for granted, a few are well documented.

The film Norma Rae, based on an actual strike in a textile mill, popularized the image of a modem working woman devoted to her union. But at least three earlier U.S. strikes in which women played leading roles have been recorded or reconstructed on film. With Babies and Banners documents the 1937 strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, in which women auto workers and workers’ wives—dubbed the “Red Berets”—held the battle lines out front while male workers occupied the Fisher I and II automotive plants for more than a month. (Women workers were sent out before the sit-down in order to avoid the appearance of licentiousness.)

In 1973, women sustained the horrific coal strike at the Brookside mine in Kentucky on a steady diet of soup-kitchen stamina and political zeal; that strike was the subject of the documentary Harlan County USA. And at a point in time halfway between the Flint and Brookside strikes, while McCarthyism burned white-hot, a militant strike led by women against Empire Zinc in Hanover, New Mexico, was immortalized in the film Salt of the Earth.

Of the three, the 1951 Empire Zinc strike especially foreshadowed the complexities of the Phelps Dodge strike. Both were shaped by the special conflicts of economics, ethnicity and gender that impregnate the social fabric of an isolated, predominantly Mexican-American mining town, where a women’s place is in the home, or on the line—depending.

This is the fortune of the woman warrior, too frail to defend her nation in battle but sturdy enough to take her nation’s gunfire in a strike. Every tradition has its price, and most have been bought and sold many times over-history often decides that a woman’s place is to do the work of men for half the pay.

Flossie Navarro and her companions, who a year earlier couldn’t have gotten a job selling sandwiches in a mine, were gladly given hard hats when World War II simultaneously swept out the men and slapped a premium price tag on copper.

The use of women in mines at convenient historical moments is at least as old as capitalism. Émile Zola’s novel Germinal, written in 1885, tells of an actual disaster that killed women along with men in the shafts of a French coal mine. Women and children commonly worked underground in England, as a natural outgrowth of the working-class family economy in preindustrial society, until it was prohibited by law in 1842. The “pit-brow lasses” who sorted coal above-ground at British mines were seen as the very essence of degraded womanhood. This view overlooked the realities of life for working-class families, and the appetite of mining companies for low-cost labor

The women who mined ore in England, France, Bolivia, or Clifton, Arizona, were a few among many who have been picked up on a wave, carried into the current, and beached again like driftwood, swept by the tides of deficit and profit. The rule applies not just to women but to any subordinate population; employers call them “an expandable labor force.”

As late as the 1960s, segregation here was absolute. It extending to housing, schools, movie theaters, and social clubs. The first interracial couple in Morenci—a white woman who married a Mexican man—couldn’t rent a house for decades. As one woman who grew up here put it, “There was a separate everything.” In Ajo, Mexican-Americans were allowed to swim in the public pool once a week, on Wednesdays, just before the water was changed.

In these isolated towns the Company dictated virtually every physical aspect of life: housing, schooling, social life. If Company policy was racist, then the confines of race were inescapable. It’s easy enough, then, to understand why Mexican-Americans were leaders of the union movement: fighting the conditions of their employment provided the only recourse against injustice.

Flossie Navaro is undeniably tough. She didn’t hesitate to tell me or anyone else how she felt about holding down what was reputed to be a man’s job: “Why, you didn’t have no choice, you just did it. You couldn’t say ‘let a man do it.’ You had to get right in there and lift and work right beside them.” Flossie interrupted herself to fan the flowered bosom of her dress, as if memory alone could return her body to the inferno of the smelter. After a few seconds of reverie she looked at me with a gleam in her blue eyes.

I’ll tell you what. If the men gave me trouble, I’d just say, “Well, damn ya. I’ll show you I can do it if you can.“ And that’s what you had to do. You couldn’t be a kiddie-baby and cry for them to give you a easy job. You had to pull your weight.

For most of the war years the women in the Morenci mine had no union. They were organized briefly under the auspices of, oddly enough, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, because it was considered a women’s union. But by all accounts the women miners were militant. They pulled off a wildcat strike for better working conditions. One of their demands was for “women’s things” (sanitary supplies) in the bathrooms. But according to Flossie, the incident that precipitated the strike was the firing of two sisters for allegedly “flirting with the floorwalkers.“ She recollects that a hearing was called, and women packed the hall to testify about sexual harassment from the foremen. The strike lasted only a few days; the women won their demands.

When the boys in uniform returned at last, nearly everyone expected the women to go home quietly. “Phelps Dodge gave us a pretty good round,” Flossie says. “It wasn’t the bosses up there in the front offices, it was the floorwalkers that gave us trouble.”

Eddie Marquez puts it another way. “The company was trying to push them out more or less on the sly. They said a woman couldn’t lift those sample buckets, that they couldn’t shovel on chains, and all that. They never said that during the war, just afterwards.” But by this time the Mine-Mill union had been officially chartered in Morenci, and it had a clause stating that “all people are created equal.” The women joined, and the union stood behind any who wished to keep their jobs in the mine.

Flossie Navarro and several of her women comrades won the right to stay, and did. Flossie worked right on through several decades of modern history, more or less ignoring the Feminine Mystique of the ’50s and the so-called birth of feminism in the ’60s. She helped her husband support their 11 children until she reached a ripe age for retirement.

Marquez, who fought to get Mine-Mill organized in Morenci, says the union held onto its radical reputation during the postwar years. In 1946, Mine-Mill led a 107-day strike that ended with the signing of its first contract, which included equal pay for all new hires. The union showed proof that three Arizona mining companies were hiring Anglo males as “helpers,” at $6.36 per shift, and “other employees” (Latinos and Indians) as “laborers,” at $5.21 per shift with no hope of raises or promotions.

Mike Baray insists the union made a world of difference to Mexican workers, and eventually to all the workers. “After we got our union, other unions started coming in: pipe fitters, the machinists, the electricians-all the craft trades. But we Mexicans were really the fighters. We used to call those others the ‘me-too’ unions.”

Marquez confirms this view. It’s his recollection, in fact, that the craft unions rarely even negotiated a contract. “We would negotiate, then the Anglos would come along and say, ‘Just sign me, too.’ The Mexicans fought harder because we were discriminated against-these other guys had all the cushy jobs. After we got the union it got better and better.”

Even so, the tradition of discrimination in Arizona mines was too tough to die. Roy Santa Cruz came into the Phelps Dodge mines in the mid-50s on what he called the Rustling Shift.

It was like herding cattle. They would put everybody on a stage where they could look you over. They would pull out 10 guys in a group, and the foreman would say, “You got a job for a day. I want you to take a big drink of water, because I don’t want to see you at the fountain. All I want to see is asses and elbows.” All us Mexicans went straight to the track gang or the smelter. There were no clean jobs for us.

Previous agreements were supposed to have ended the dual wage scale and other blunt forms of discrimination, but inequities persisted. Well into the 1960s, for example, Anglo and Mexican-American men still changed in separate facilities. The “Mexican locker rooms” were generally inferior and some-times had only cold showers. In Morenci the change rooms consisted of one original facility divided by a specially constructed barrier. Such was the importance of segregation.

“The day they finally broke that wall down, everything changed,” recalls Mike Baray. A white co-worker complained that he would have to stop showering after work because he didn’t intend to do it in the presence of a Mexican. Baray told him, with a smile, “Well, that’s up to you.”

In 1967, the unions tackled housing. Since even the roof over one’s head is a condition of employment in a company town, it dawned on miners that segregation was a union issue-not just a fact of life. Through an eight-month strike they scored a victory over housing discrimination in Phelps Dodge towns.

Eddie Marquez, by then a 20-year veteran of his union, led the final negotiations:

We met in the Steelworkers’ Hall in Douglas: federal housing people, Phelps Dodge, and the union negotiating committee. By that time we had the Unity Council [a coalition of all 13 unions in the Morenci mine], so we got the others to go with us: the machinists, the United Transportation Union, everybody. Those UTU guys were all Anglos—P.D. didn’t let Mexicans on the trains at that time—but they were with us all the way.

Marquez says he’ll never forget the climax of that meeting:

Pat Scanlon told the government officials that the reason the company could not let us into the better housing was because the Mexicans—this is what he said—the Mexicans were very dirty. He said it right in front of us. The negotiating committee was mostly Mexican-American. We all went wild, including the Anglos.

Some UTU guys got up and said, “If they’re dirty, we are too! You go to a Mexican house and you won’t see anything but clean.” We were really mad. Old Gonzalez started yelling, “Remember the Alamo! We Mexicans don’t quit!”

Pat Scanlon was at that time assistant director for labor relations in Morenci. When I asked him about the remark Eddie Marquez claimed he’d made 20 years before, Scanlon denied having made it and did not remember the meeting in question.

I do remember some bargaining sessions in which that was discussed. Housing discrimination was a big subject at that time, because that was the period when things were changing in the U.S., and it was occasionally discussed with some heat. But I never would have said that.

By the time of the 1983 strike, Scanlon was vice-president of finance for the Phelps Dodge Corporation.

Lydia Gonzalez Knott weathered the strike with her mother, son, and two daughters in a sea-blue house on a street that is never—like most other streets in Clifton—called by its actual name. The street sign is wrong anyway. The hill is so steep and cut with gullies that a small footbridge leads from the street to the house. The front porch, with wrought-iron railings and floorboards worn smooth by generations of neighborhood children, overlooks the steep valley that holds the San Francisco River and the town of Clifton. Up at the head of the valley is the entrance to the Morenci mine. Lydia has lived in this house all her life.

She is a miner’s daughter, a miner’s sister, and, since 1979, a miner herself. “When I was 25 and divorced with three kids to support,” she explained, “I knew it was time to go to work for the company.” She was hired initially as a laborer in the mill, later promoted to mill repair-the only woman on a crew of 66. “I enjoyed the work because I was learning to do a lot of new things. I worked with jackhammers, sledgehammers, air wrenches that weigh 100 pounds. I can operate a 160-ton crane.”

When the strike came, there was no question:

My dad was president of the Boilermakers for over 25 years. He worked for the company for 34 years—my mom is a union widow. My dad was strong in the union and gave it all he had. When the unions went out on strike, my brother and I didn’t have any choice. We knew if we crossed that picket line, Dad would come out of his grave and pull on our feet at night.

That was the story, a hundred times over: money is important, sure, but in the long run you live with the ghost of your father. “I’m a striker,” says Gloria Blase, “because I believe in what my dad fought for. He worked as a crane operator for 15 years before P.D. gave him the same benefits as the white operators.” Gloria’s father was Mexican, devoted to his union; her mother is Tohono O’odham. Gloria grew up attuned to the desert’s seasons and the rhythm of contracts and strikes. She knew that for several months out of every third year, it was going to be beans and tortillas.

For all they have in common, Gloria has never met Lydia because she lives in another Phelps Dodge town: Ajo, Arizona. It’s possible, barely, to drive between Ajo and Clifton in a day. It’s a stunning drive, crossing through boulder-filled canyons and deep blue mountain ranges that rise up from the desert like coral reefs out of an ocean floor. In almost any season the drive is also spectacularly hot and wearisome. A traveler’s patience with stunning natural beauty will wear thin. But making that drive is probably the only way to get a conviction for the distance between these towns—a distance I never could quite believe in. On reaching Ajo, finding it cloaked in the same yellow haze that envelops Morenci, I would strike up a conversation with someone like Gloria and hear words that matched to the letter those of someone I’d talked with 200 miles ago.

Arizona’s mining towns are impossibly remote: far from each other and from anything else. Bisbee, the old stronghold of the industry, is in the southeastern comer of the state, barely six miles from the Mexican border. North from there, more than a hundred slow, winding miles, lies the Morenci mine with a pair of small towns on its lip: Clifton and Morenci. The Morenci mine is tucked into the mountains at the edge of the Colorado Plateau, a great rim of high, forested rifts and valleys curving across the state toward the Grand Canyon. Far to the west, across a vast, dry stretch of Tohono O’odham reservation, is Ajo; the word is Spanish for “garlic,” though no one remembers much of anything green ever growing there.

The nearest city of any size, Tucson, is roughly in the center of the Ajo-Morenci-Bisbee triangle of mines, and a long drive from any. People who live in a Phelps Dodge town don’t often leave, unless it’s to work on a ranch in the outlying area. The women, especially, have little mobility. As Stella Baray put it, “It’s a family town. We stay here.”

In nature there is a phenomenon called convergent evolution: Through time, similar forces acting on unrelated organisms in widely separate places manage to create similar-looking creatures. Thus, for example, deserts on nearly every continent are home to some animal that looks like a sand-colored gerbil and some plant that looks like a cactus.

History has done something like this to the copper-mining towns of Arizona. In spite of their isolation from one another, the same force has wrenched and sanded each of them into a shape that is noticeably the same. Identical themes surface in the lives of the people rooted there. It seems as if the great mineral hole that gapes open in each of these towns leads down through the earth like those ancient tunnels under the Andes. A person might walk down into one of these mines one day and surface in another mine a hundred miles away.

Separated by a world of mountain and desert, the women of these disparate towns carried a single flag into battle when the time came. Nearly every one of them spoke of a grandfather who’d walked out of the Morenci mine in 1915 or left Bisbee by cattle car in 1917, or a father who struggled for a decent life while bearing discrimination like a scar.

The threat to their standard of living was not just personally dangerous; they saw it as an insult to their ancestors. These tiny, isolated towns have steeped for half a century in their own labor traditions and extracted a sense of pride that provides their only medicine against hard times. Even for those women who weren’t miners themselves, the union they’d grown up with was a tool as familiar to them as a can opener or a stove.

They knew exactly where they would be without it: Living in Tortilla Flats or Indian Town, barred from the social club, the library and the swimming pool. Living with husbands who broke their backs and spirits for half a white man’s wage. Regardless of age or color, they’d be women living with prospects no higher than carhop and laundromat, women working against the odds, women damned as bad luck in a devil’s domain. They marched for the union because they knew in their bones a union banner was the only curtain between themselves and humiliation. Being cursed by scabs or the National Guard is a lesser evil by far than the curse of a father’s ghost.

And when they marched into battle, they found skills they never suspected they had. Mothers who used to be too shy to speak up at a PTA meeting now crossed the country addressing crowds of thousands. While they were away, their husbands learned to iron their own shirts. These women came home with a new way of looking at a power structure in which they’d been lodged like gravel in a tire.

Shirley Randall is the type who doesn’t open her mouth until she knows exactly what she means to say. She is tallish and quiet, with an angular body uncompromised by T-shirt and union cap. Her demeanor is modest in the extreme. During the strike she was elected treasurer of the Morenci Miners Women’s Auxiliary; in time that meant she would be responsible for relatively enormous sums of money. Shirley says she had never thought of herself as a capable person. She dropped out of high school and didn’t collect the nerve to go back for her diploma until she was 28 and a mother of four. “I thought I was dumb, I really did. When I took those classes, I never did speak up and ask questions.” But she got the diploma.

Shortly afterward, in 1975, she was hired as a general laborer in the Morenci mine. Four years later she quit because of continuous sexual harassment. “Men in this town …” she says simply, in a tone that explains a whole way of being born, living and dying.

I put up with so much from the men. They thought the wife’s place was in the home. But when a lot of those same men went out on strike, you better believe they were glad to see me out there on the line.

One of the most remarkable facts of the Phelps Dodge Strike is that it was carried out mainly by women. As a result, the women’s lives were transformed in obvious and compelling ways. The dominant role they assumed in maintaining the long strike appeared to anyone who noticed to be one of the unique features of the conflict. If it wasn’t actually unique—if women have been shouldering the burden of labor struggles since mines and mills began—it still seemed very surprising to people both inside and outside the strike, leading one to believe that women’s aptitude for this kind of work is a well-kept secret.

After the strike was over, their participation and accomplishments were doubted; such doubts, in fact, constituted the principal criticism of this book upon its release. A review of Holding the Line in the New York Times was less concerned with the book’s actual content than with what it did not contain, fretting greatly over the question: “Where are the men?” Several weeks later a limp, much-photocopied clip of this review had made it all the way to Clifton, Arizona. A member of the women’s strike committee called me on the phone and confided with good humor, “That’s just what we’ve been asking ourselves all this time. Where were the men?”

In truth, the men were present insofar as they were able to be. Many were there day in and day out, supporting the strike as best they could. All strike negotiations were carried out by union officials, and predictably, these were all men. Their absence from the picket line was not a choice but a predicament forced upon them, first by a legal injunction and eventually by economic necessity.

When a strike wears on for more than a few weeks, a union family must look for some other source of income, if only temporarily. A Company Town is by definition a one-employer town, and for strikers during a strike it’s a no-employer town. The men trained to labor in the Phelps Dodge mines had to venture far from home, frequently as far as Texas and California, to keep their families fed during the almost two years the strike remained unresolved. Their contribution to the struggle was crucial. The best way to put it might be that many a great man stood behind the great women of the strike.

Nevertheless, this story is about the people who held the line. Those people were women. Some of them, no doubt, were born noble and others were nudged or frightened or bamboozled into it, but there they were. Their ranks included women old enough to have worked the mines during World War II, and some young enough to be a little vague about Vietnam. Many had husbands or brothers or fathers or sons who worked in a mine, and some knew that work themselves. Most had children whom they saw threatened by the forces brought in to fight the strike. All had a fierce stake in the survival of their families, their unions, and their community—categories that don’t easily separate one from another in an isolated mining camp.

That women would march to the front of a fight such as this hardly seems surprising, and yet it was. Husbands scratched their heads, bystanders hooted in wonder, armed guards sent to subdue them looked embarrassed, and the women stared at their own hands—which sometimes clutched rocks or baseball bats—and hooted in wonder themselves. Nothing in their lives so far, not their families nor their church nor their TV sets, had ever prepared them to look in the mirror and behold a fighter. But now life offered them no other vision. Women scrapping tooth and nail for survival, however commonplace, still don’t get much dignified exposure in our culture.

I’ve chosen to tell here a story played out on a smaller stage and completed in the space of less than two years. I did not choose the plot of Holding the Line on account of its happier ending, for I seem to have come to it long before anyone could know how it might end. I chose it simply because I was there, and it’s the story I witnessed.

Bearing witness, however, is not so straightforward a thing as we narrators would have you believe. We are just like the blind men who examined the elephant and came away crying “Rope!” “No, tree trunk!” “No, stupid, it’s a wall!” Seven or 70 witnesses can come away from the same event with seven or 70 stories, and generally do. I believe that while some of those stories are bound to be more relevant than others, every one of them carries its own particular truth. This belief of mine is heresy against the first commandment of journalism, which claims that the objective writer will convey events directly from the scene of action to the reader’s mind without casting his or her own shadow on the page. According to this tenet, all the good journalists will come away from an event with essentially the same story.

The sooner we have dispensed with this myth, the better. Anyone who has been alive for more than 15 minutes has begun to form judgments and preferences. Journalists, like other mortals, must sift through the thousands of data points in their field of vision and decide which few among them really matter. That these decisions reflect our personalities is not deliberate malpractice, but a symptom of humanity.

True objectivity may only be possible for those who do not care in the least what happens next, and have formed no expectations—an undirected camera snapping at random, the sound and the fury, a tale told by an idiot.

It’s not what we should expect from our peers, especially those to whom we look for information. We place our trust in those who have intentions. And in every science, journalism included, the thing that one expects—or hopes for—will inevitably influence one’s perception of the outcome. Believing themselves the very soul of objectivity, 19th-century scientists measured men’s and women’s skulls of various races and constructed a hierarchy of brain size and intelligence—with Caucasian men settled comfortably at the top.

Scientists who measure those same skulls now are baffled by their predecessors’ results, as no such concrete differences seem to exist. With similar righteous zeal, we journalists threw ourselves in 1983 upon the strike zone. Many were sent by newspapers that sought intrinsically to reinforce the law-and-order appetites of an urban, white-collar readership. They measured strikers’ skulls and came away with reports of craven, violent anarchists. Industrious photographers looked past rows of orderly strikers to snap the singular disorderly drunk or—in one famous case—the lone man whose frustration at a violent attack on unarmed strikers led him to walk stark naked into the cloud of tear gas. Every other striker, without exception, wore clothes every day for 18 months, and yet in the outside world it was the Naked Man of Morenci who became a sort of poster boy for the strike.

Perhaps most surprising of all, reporters who visited the strike zone tended to overlook the participation of women in the strike. TV cameras hinted of women on the line, if not their actual predominance, but interviewers drastically favored men over women. For outsiders who weren’t familiar with the daily business of the strike, this might not seem so surprising—they hadn’t come here looking for a vanguard that sported ponytails and nail polish, so they just couldn’t see the leaders lined up in front of them. What makes it surprising is that in order to perpetrate this oversight, especially after the first week of the strike, it became necessary to use some version of Clark Kent’s X-ray vision to see through what were frequently all-woman picket lines.

I was no less prejudiced than other reporters of the strike. I’ve always claimed simply that my prejudices are equally strong but different from the mainstream. This assertion of mine has led some critics to describe my story as “an admittedly biased account.” True enough, but I know when I’m being patted on the head. The implication is that the alternative to an “admittedly biased” book is a real-live honest, accurate one. I contend, on the contrary, that among books written by humans the only alternative is a “secretly biased” one. Both sorts of accounts can be more or less accurate, but where honesty is concerned, an unacknowledged bias hits a lot farther off the mark than an acknowledged one. The latter is less insidious, and probably more useful to the reader.

The biases that frame this account are plain enough: I was open to the possibility of a vanguard in ponytails and nail polish. I belong to a contrary generation. After having spent my education reading of men’s experience almost exclusively—in American and English literature, in history, in philosophy, in science, in the world at large—I’d begun to look for balance. Even as a child I could see very well that the world was abundantly populated with women, and now as a writer I hoped to articulate the relatively uncharted terrain of women’s experience.

When I first drove into Clifton to watch and report on a strike, I expected a manly tale of picks and shovels and union halls. My ears perked up when it began to tum into something else, a morality play whose iconography always included a pot of menudo simmering dead center. I identified easily with the women of the strike, and it’s fair to say they were more willing to talk with me than were the men, though I found distinguished exceptions, especially among the strike’s older patriarchs.

I also started this project with a sympathy for the strikers’ cause. I grew up in a part of rural Kentucky that teaches nothing if not the lessons of class struggle and the survival value of collective action. Still, where this strike was concerned I intended to be a good journalist: to remain anonymous, talk to both sides, and render a balanced account. This absurd intention had a short life. Anyone who has passed time in a small town knows that anonymity in such places is a daydream. And anyone who has lived in a town deeply divided over a life-and-death issue knows that if you aren’t willing to declare your allegiances, you’re unlikely to get served a cup of coffee in the diner, much less engender anyone’s trust.

Long before I became “The gal that’s writing the book,” I knew I did not want to be a hit-and-run reporter. I wanted to write something more than the nightly sound-bite wrap-up or the extended analysis of the surface of things that passes for news in our society. I wanted the people in this strike to show me the heart and soul of their struggle; I needed to be trusted.

By the time the strike was a few months old, driving a motorized vehicle through Clifton, Ariz., was as perilous as steering a ship through the Persian Gulf. Never mind the make of your truck; it’s the brand of your allegiance that matters. Which side are you on?

“Neither” is a traitor’s option. Try watching a mother dragged from her house by policemen who crack crude jokes while they bind her in chains in front of her young daughter. Say to her, “You know, I’m really not sure whether I’m on your side or theirs.” When she gets out of jail a week later, go knock on her door and ask her to tell you what happened. Expect to see that door slammed in your face. Please understand you deserve it.

By October 1983, I’d completed my newspaper assignments. I put away my objective pretensions, flagged my truck front and back with bright orange “Support the Copper Strikers” bumper stickers, drove back to Clifton, and began to look for the story.

From time to time, bumper stickers notwithstanding, I did manage to talk with police and national guard officers, and sometimes with people who had crossed the picket line. Even high officials of the Phelps Dodge Corporation—the bitterest enemies of the strikers—were surprisingly helpful and forth-coming. I gained insight from all these conversations, and they do add a layer of balance to this account. But mostly I talked with men and women who, sooner or later, gave their all to the strike.

We talked in kitchens and on back-porch swings and in the cabs of trucks with the engines running. We talked in a bar called The Refrigerated Cave, and in PJ’s Open for Breakfast Restaurant. Mostly we talked on the picket line, where for every one of more than 500 days, women stood on the road’s gravel shoulder to face the strikebreakers coming on and off at least two shifts a day. There were moments of high drama when a strikebreaker would wave a gun, or the somber, ubiquitous police presence would erupt into shocking violence.

In between, there were hours and days of tense waiting. Sometimes the only relief was comic. Impromptu skits and gossip broke the boredom. Women who had never used profanity in their lives now had small contests to expand their vocabularies. After Berta Chavez was apprehended by police officers who literally ripped off her brassiere while forcing her into custody, she returned to the picket line calling on her attackers by name whenever she saw them, reminding them loudly, “Hey, you owe me a bra!”

But there were more worries than laughs. Sometimes picketers watched the barrels of machine guns tracking their movements and had to contain themselves in absolute terror. They held the line because of each other, reminding themselves continually of what they knew they believed. I do not know what all-male picket lines are like, never having stood on one. But in this strike—a strike of women—the atmosphere on the line became intensely, movingly confessional. During those drawn-out days I developed a great admiration and fondness for the people whose stories are told here.

Many people have asked me, since, as a writer of fiction, I appear to possess the skills of prevarication, why I didn’t cast the story of Holding the Line as a novel rather than a work of nonfiction.

But that it really happened is exactly the point—and that’s why not. I believe the most important thing about this story is that it is true.

In a place a few hours’ drive from where I live, the government, the police and a mining company formed a conspicuous partnership to break the lives of people standing together for what they thought was right. That ironclad, steel-toed partnership arrested hundreds of citizens on charges so ludicrous that the state, after having perfectly executed its plan of intimidating the leadership and turning public sympathy against the strikers, quietly dropped every case.

When I begin to tell people what happened during the strike of ’83, it often happens that they stop me and say, “This was eighteen eighty-three, right?” No. It was 1983, right here in the United States of America. Ronald Reagan was president, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was on the radio. People who got crushed for organizing unions were thought to live in faraway lands like Poland and South Africa. This was the land of the free and the home of the brave. U.S. citizens had so much confidence in law enforcement, they merrily went along with the rallying cry of “More Police!” as an answer to most social ills. They would barely blink when the U.S. attorney general declared that innocent people don’t get arrested in America.

A novel at its best sheds insight on life, but the reader may choose to take or leave its lessons. I would like in this case to narrow that choice, and so this is not a novel. It is a cautionary tale.

Its lesson is: Watch your back, America. Take civil liberty for granted at your own risk. Trust in leaders who arrive into power by means of wealth, and see what they protect when push comes to shove. What happened in Arizona could happen again and it will, somewhere, to someone. It will happen again and again, if we do not open our eyes and believe what we see.

This story’s other lesson is hope. If a group of people who described themselves as “nobody really, just housewives” could endure so much without breaking, if they could bear the meanness of their nation without becoming mean-spirited themselves, if they could come away with a passion for justice instead of revenge, then ordinary people are better than they are generally thought to be. That all this, too, really happened is extremely important. I did not invent these women; they invented themselves. What happened to them could happen to you, or me, and perhaps sometime it will. For better and for worse, this is a story of what could become of us.

From Holding the Line. Copyright © 1989, 1996 by Barbara Kingsolver, published by Cornell University Press. Reprinted by permission of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

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Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955, and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. Her 2022 novel Demon Copperhead won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. At various times in her adult life she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to rural southwestern Virginia where she currently resides. She has two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996). Her husband, Steven Hopp, teaches environmental studies. Since June 2004, Barbara and her family have lived on a farm in southern Appalachia, where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep. Barbara believes her best work is accomplished through writing and being an active citizen of her own community. For a more complete biography, see “Barbara Reveals Herself.”