The author shares his fascination with a distinctive corner of the country--Bisbee, Arizona--with a narrative that reflects the history of the area, the beauty of the landscape, and his own life

Undermining Race rewrites the history of race, immigration, and labor in the copper industry in Arizona. The book focuses on the case of Italian immigrants in their relationships with Anglo, Mexican, and Spanish miners (and at times with blacks, Asian Americans, and Native Americans), requiring a reinterpretation of the way race was formed and figured across place and time. Phylis Martinelli argues that the case of Italians in Arizona provides insight into “in between” racial and ethnic categories, demonstrating that the categorizing of Italians varied from camp to camp depending on local conditions—such as management practices in structuring labor markets and workers’ housing, and the choices made by immigrants in forging communities of language and mutual support. Italians—even light-skinned northern Italians—were not considered completely “white” in Arizona at this historical moment, yet neither were they consistently racialized as non-white, and tactics used to control them ranged from micro to macro level violence. To make her argument, Martinelli looks closely at two “white camps” in Globe and Bisbee and at the Mexican camp of Clifton-Morenci. Comparing and contrasting the placement of Italians in these three camps shows how the usual binary system of race relations became complicated, which in turn affected the existing race-based labor hierarchy, especially during strikes. The book provides additional case studies to argue that the biracial stratification system in the United States was in fact triracial at times. According to Martinelli, this system determined the nature of the associations among laborers as well as the way Americans came to construct “whiteness.”

Visually, the Bisbee of today remains a community frozen in time, with Main Street retaining its character from 1910. The discovery of copper deposits in the Mule Mountains brought forth a wealth that enabled a substantial community. Profitable mining ventures and a need for labor drew thousands of miners from around the world to work in Bisbee. These individuals added a distinct flavor to the area. Like countless other Western mining camps, Bisbee evolved from a rough frontier community surviving disastrous fires and floods into a town with a substantial population and solid foundation. Bisbee's seemingly inexhaustible mineral wealth resulted in the community becoming a center of economic and political power in an emerging territory on its way to statehood. It was Arizona's greatest copper camp.

Bisbee, Arizona represents the emergence of industrialism in the Far West, the perfection of mining technology by Eastern capitalists to tap and exploit wandering ore bodies that were difficult to find and just as difficult to follow. Bisbee become synonymous with paternalism - a "White Man's Mining Camp," a feudal state in the desert, where labor and management eventually clashed head-on forever tarnishing the reputation of one of the nation's foremost mining companies and a number of distinguished families. The fascinating Bisbee story is told here.

No two towns so personify the lure of the American West as much as Tombstone and Bisbee, Arizona. These boom towns welcomed the hard rock miners from Europe as they sought to extract the silver and later the copper from the earth. They provided at least the chance of getting rich, although few ever did. Today the towns are living museums. With remnants of the glory days of the Wild West on every corner, visitors can marvel at the locations immortalised in movies and folklore from the period, where characters such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the infamous Clantons once roamed. Through a series of detailed walks around Tombstone and Bisbee, accompanied by historic photographs from the Arizona State Archives, Arizona Historical Society, the Rose Tree Museum, and the Tombstone Courthouse, this book is the perfect companion to any visit. Jane Eppinga is a multi-award winning author of over 200 articles, and has written many books on Western history. She is a member of Western Writers of America and is an authority on southern Arizona. [Clear maps and walking routes through both towns [Historic archive photographs [Museum and attraction opening times [Historic eating, drinking and hotel suggestions [Useful travel information and events listings