What about women in the white man's camp? Gender, nation, and the redefinition of race in Cochise County, Arizona, 1853--1941

This dissertation uses a case study of one county in southeastern Arizona to trace the relationship between gender and the history of race in the American Southwest. It examines how a “multi-racial” nineteenth-century borderland of diverse mining, ranching, and farming economies, populated by people from over three dozen countries, became, by the 1930s, a world of strict borders between “Mexicans” and “white Americans.” Before 1886, the Chiricahua Apache wars encouraged integrated settlement patterns, business partnerships, and intermarriage between Mexicans and non-Mexicans in the farming region outside Tombstone. Meanwhile, the Phelps-Dodge Corporation was transforming Bisbee's copper mines into a modern, industrial economy. Mining's dual-wage system, with its “Mexican wage” and “white wage,” rested on racialized assumptions about a family wage and single-family households. Bisbee was known as a “white man's camp,” in which no Chinese lived, and no Mexicans could work as skilled miners. Many residents also hoped to exclude Italians and Slavs, arguing that they “could live as no white man can”—that is, without wives, families, and homes. Well before the Mexican Revolution and World War I, “American” became a quasi-national, quasi-racial category defined in part by gender relations and household structure. In rural areas, a rush of midwestern and southern homesteaders poured in, lured by promotions that exalted the Anglo-Saxon family and white women. The county's racial and class tensions culminated in the Bisbee Deportation of 1917, in which a thousand vigilantes rounded up 1200 striking workers—the majority Mexican and Slavic—and shipped them by boxcar into the New Mexico desert. In the aftermath, Bisbee's women reformers, whom I have labeled “corporate maternalists,” created race-segregated charities that became the basis for the nascent welfare state, and culminated in locally controlled New Deal programs that spread mining-town race relations to the rest of the county. By using a case study, this dissertation traces the meaning of race as contemporaries understood it—as a social fact inextricable from assumptions about gender, work, class, household, and geography. This dissertation builds a crossroads between the history of race, women's history, western history, labor history, and rural and urban histories.