Ethnic Identities in Arizona Copper Camps, 1880–1920

Ethnic Identities in Arizona Copper Camps, 1880–1920 Phylis Cancilla Martinelli The University of Arizona Press Tucson The University of Arizona Press © 2009 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martinelli, Phylis Cancilla. Undermining race : ethnic identities in Arizona copper camps, 1880–1920 / Phylis Cancilla Martinelli. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-2745-8 (hard cover) 1. Copper miners—Arizona—Social conditions— 19th century. 2. Copper miners—Arizona—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Copper mines and mining—Arizona—History—19th century. 4. Copper mines and mining—Arizona—History—20th century. 5. Immigrants—Arizona—Social conditions—19th century. 6. Immigrants—Arizona—Social conditions—20th century. 7. Arizona—Ethnic relations. 8. Arizona—Race relations. I. Title. HD9539.C7U5814 2009 331.7’622343089009791—dc22 2009024821 Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. C Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper containing a minimum of 30% post- consumer waste and processed chlorine free. 14 13 12 11 10 09 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Illustrations vi Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Social Change in the West 1 1 Arizona’s Economic and Social Development: Courting Copper 15 2 The Arizona Tango: The Arrival of EuroLatins—Italians and Spaniards 32 3 Encountering the Sting of Racism: Micro- and Macro-Level Violence 54 4 What’s in a Name? Wop Alley or Canyon of Salé? 78 5 Bisbee: The Whitest White Camp 102 6 The Latin Camp: The Clifton-Morenci-Metcalf District 133 7 Conclusion 165 Notes 171 Bibliography 197 Index 221 Illustrations Arizona’s mining towns 20 Tent City, Globe, ca. 1897 80 Bert and Ernesta Vidano’s grocery store, Globe, ca. 1920 93 A bocce game at the Wedge Saloon in North Globe 98 The Italian Band gathered at Barney’s Yard, Panamá, Globe, 1907 99 Baptiste Caretto in his Brewery Gulch saloon 106 Immigrant children attend Bisbee Elementary School, 1898 115 The Medigovich and Nobile Store in Brewery Gulch, ca. 1900 122 Tintown, a Mexican barrio in the Warren District, Bisbee 125 Dominic DeGrazia and his son Ettore (Ted DeGrazia), ca. 1914 149 A wedding party of Calabrese immigrants in Clifton, ca. 1920 152 Italian immigrants on a World War I patriotic float in Clifton 154 Rocco Zappia’s bakery in Clifton, ca. 1917 160 Preface and Acknowledgments The beginnings of this book idea are difficult to pin down to one source. I am by academic training a sociologist and have been since my under- graduate days. The sociology that I learned dealt with pressing societal problems, social change, and social inequality. A broad historical perspec- tive was necessary to understand contemporary society going back to the Industrial Revolution in France, Germany, and England, where pioneers like Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber worked to understand a world that was far different from agricul- tural society. My interest in ethnicity grew from coming of age during the era of the civil rights movement and the Black Power, Red Power, and Chicano move- ments. It was only later that my interest in my own ethnicity surfaced. My grandparents first made me aware of social inequality in the social system, which indirectly led me to find a niche in sociology. My maternal grandfather, Frank Nizza, was an ardent Socialist and anticlerical immigrant. Fleeing an intellectually stifling life in a small Italian town, he left a comfortable, but stagnant, position as a second son to work as a laborer in the United States. In his autobiography he recounted the hardships he endured as an immigrant and the prejudice and discrimination he fought. More salient to this book is his account of a stint as a laborer in an Alaskan gold mine, having left San Francisco six months after the April 1906 earthquake and fire. In his words (translated into English): For six months I sailed along the coast; then I left for Australia. The voyage lasted one month, and then we stopped a month at Sydney, Australia, to repair the boat. I returned to San Francisco, then I left for Seattle, Washington. From Seattle I embarked for Alaska as a passenger. Alaska is found opposite Siberian Russia. I landed at Nome [Alaska] the 12th of June—I had to walk 250 miles—there was no transportation since the sea was frozen. It was necessary to walk in that desert of snow and ice carrying shel- ter and supplies, and to sleep on the ground, on the ice. Having arrived at the destination, I worked sixty days separating the gold from the dirt. The existence was not too bad; I slept under a tent. I had to wear gloves and a veil on my face, because in the midst of the snow and ice, the mosquitoes did not give me peace. The cli- mate was very cold, but I saw the sun twenty-three hours a day. It was summer because in winter it is always night. We were a short distance from the North Pole. I returned to Seattle, Washington, and worked a short while in the lumber mill. I saw that traveling over the world I did not make much progress; therefore I returned to San Francisco, and I established myself there.1 My paternal grandmother, Rosa Chirco Cancilla, using the oral tra- dition of morality tales, taught me what it was to be a “woman of serious- ness.” Both grandparents preached messages of racial tolerance, for each of them had been befriended by African Americans in their early years in this country. Before my grandfather headed to California, a padrone (labor bro- ker) sent him to Florida, where he opted to board with African Americans, who, he warmly recalled, treated him like family. My grandmother’s story was more dramatic. My great-grandparents on my father’s side left Sicily to look for work in New Orleans, since immigrant labor was used to replace free black labor after the Civil War. Rosa recalled that in 1891, when a lynch mob swept through the Italian quarter of New Orleans, it was their black neighbors who hid them. In that infamous event, eleven Sicilians were killed. When several Western historians recently began writing about violence toward Italians, my family history encouraged me to explore this research further, with startling, disquieting results. The next dimension of my interest came as a Californian transplanted in the 1970s to Arizona, where my interest in ethnic history led me to work on the Phoenix History Project under the direction of Professor Wesley Johnson. Along the way I met Arizona State University archivist Christine Marin, who piqued my interest in ethnicity in Arizona mining towns and who has kept me on track with her continuing help. I began doing oral histories of Italians living in mining towns because the importance of preserving their stories was clear to me. Along the way, my work on my doctorate in sociology started. Part of my doctoral pro- gram involved studying for a language examination, which I decided to take in Italian. This fortuitous choice led me to Helen Bechetti Dover in viii Preface and Acknowledgments a language class we took together. She was the second authentic native from an Arizona mining town I met and, like Chris Marin, became an enthusiastic supporter of my research. Not only did Helen do a number of interviews for me but she accompanied me on trips to mining towns. (As a city girl, I was a little jittery about driving into Arizona’s foreboding Pinal Mountains to Globe.) Along the way, many other Arizona natives granted interviews, and some even shared precious photos. Janette Carretto Bowling took time to show me Globe and introduce me around, and in Tucson, Monica Zappia Young assisted me and shared her enthu- siasm for family history, introducing me to her extensive Padilla and Cordova clan as well. Delving deeper into Arizona’s past, I discovered the state archives under a beautiful copper dome in Phoenix and spent hours there, labori- ously copying information from the Great Registers of Voters for Arizona, in the pre-laptop era, to compile a database on transmigration and residen- tial patterns of Italians throughout the state. Data were collected on 560 men born in Italy; for 170 of them, additional occupational information was also available. Eventually, I was able to provide richly detailed portraits of some of these immigrants by combining the transmigration material with information gleaned from various other sources. Although the study was presented at a conference, unfortunately it was not published. Opportunities to pursue Arizona history kept popping up. I had a chance to do research on the Roosevelt Dam labor force and act as a con- sultant on ethnic groups for a new museum in Phoenix. Each project built on the previous one, allowing me to develop layers of understanding about the role of Italians in a social environment far different from that of the East Coast, typically associated with this ethnic group because of the heavy con- centrations of Italians, and different from the environment Italians encoun- tered in San Francisco, which is often associated with upward mobility. I realized the Arizona setting was unique in many ways. The generally sparse population at the time under study made it possible to do work that encom- passed all of Arizona. Immigrants began arriving in Arizona in an early period, many from northern Italy; they often lived in racially mixed communities separated from all but poor whites, and they occupied an intermediate status in the racial hierarchy of the state.

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