Butler's Cinema Scene

“BISBEE ’17” My rating: B+

112 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

A little-known but horrifying bit of Americana comes disturbingly to life in “Bisbee’17,” a doc in which the past and the present find an uncomfortable accommodation.

In Bisbee AZ on July 12, 1917, hastily deputized citizens raided the homes of copper miners on strike for higher wages and safer working conditions. At gunpoint the strikers were taken to a baseball field and told to either return to work or face permanent exile from Bisbee.

More than 1,200 refused the offer, were loaded on railroad cattle cars and dropped off in the New Mexico desert without food and water. Mass deaths were avoided only when New Mexico officials stepped in to establish a refugee camp.

Robert Greene’s excellent film, shot during the preparations for a centennial observation of that event (“celebration” hardly seems the right word), is not only about a dark moment in labor history, but about how it continues to resonate over the years, especially now that we find ourselves as divided as ever in our lifetimes — or our parents’ lifetimes.

The film singles out a handful of Bisbee citizens, some of whom are portraying their own ancestors in a town-wide recreation of the deportation.  One woman reveals that her grandfather deported his own brother — a labor sympathizer — at gunpoint.

Behind the event were the copper interests, especially the Phelps Dodge Corp., which viewed the agitation of the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) with concern.

The company surreptitiously recruited local law enforcement, terrified the “good” citizens with tales of the strikers hoarding dynamite for terrorist attacks, and on the day of the deportation took over the telegraph and telephone  lines so that not even the local state representative could get word to the governor and legislature.

For years after, Bisbee’s citizens didn’t talk about the deportation…not with each other and certainly not with outsiders.

“In a company town the company makes the rules,” observes one resident.

Re-enactors portray their ancestors in a recreation of the Bisbee deportation

Bisbee is no longer a company town. During nearly 90 years Bisbee’s copper mines extracted 8 billion pounds of ore from two massive pits and miles of tunnels. But when the mines closed in the mid-’70s, the town went from Arizona’s richest to its poorest. Still, there are residents who look at the schools and public buildings erected with copper company money, and see the mine operators as benign dictators.

Over nearly two hours Greene’s film examines the deportation from a variety of perspectives.  According to some, the deportation was only partly a labor issue. Given that all the “deputies” were white and the strikers overwhelmingly foreign born (especially Mexican), the Bisbee event might be viewed as a matter of ethnic cleansing.

Though the deportation had no basis in Arizona law — in fact some of the perpetrators were arraigned but none convicted — to this day a few  Bisbee-ians view it as justified, since the strike threatened production of a vital mineral resource during wartime. To them this was a case of community safety vs. radical agitators, of patriotism vs. godless socialism.

There are some profoundly weird moments here.  A tourist bus ride that follows the route of the kidnapped miners bills itself as the “deportation express.”

And the planners of the big re-enactment decide to make it a musical.  They note that the I.W.W. was big on protest songs, so there’s a soundtrack ready to pick from. Also, says one organizer, a muscial tends to blunt the raw edges of what is essentially a very ugly story.

| Robert W. Butler