Ajo, Arizona sits about 43 miles
from the Mexican border. It is a one stoplight town with a population of around
2,500 year-round residents that increases to closer to 4,000 when the snowbirds
migrate south for the winter.
Ajo is a town of borders. Prior
to the town’s founding the land on which it sits belonged to the Tohono O’odham Nation. The Nation stretched from present day Arizona into
Sonora, Mexico. In the mid-1500s, Fray Marcos, a Spanish missionary, leading a
small expedition in search of the famed City of Cibola arrived in the Nation.
Fray Marcos was followed by Melchior Diaz and the much larger conquistador expedition
of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Coronado’s men and weapons overpowered the settled
tribes on the Nation and the Spanish slowly colonized the entire area.
The Tohono O’odham Nation and the
Spanish continued mining on a small scale and Ajo remained part of Mexico for
the next 300 years until the Gadsden purchase in 1854. The Gadsden purchase,
negotiated between James Gadsden, US Ambassador to Mexico, and Mexican
President Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, ceded 29,670 square miles of Mexican territory
to the United States and moved the border southward to follow the courses of
the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers. Not only were people who had formerly been
Mexicans become US citizens but the Tohono O’odham Nation was slashed in half,
separating families who had lived on the land for generations.
Between 1854 and 1884, Ajo was
little more than a staging post. In 1884, Tom Childs re-opened the mines that
had been abandoned by the Spanish, and the Arizona Mining and Trading Company
established Ajo’s first copper mine. As industrial revolution bought new
technology to mining, Phelps Dodge began open-pit copper mining in 1911 and a
new set of borders were created. On the ridge, were the grand houses of the
mine owners, overlooking the spectacular desert landscape. The lower town was
segregated into white, Mexican and Native American sections with the living
conditions become progressively worse and the pay progressively lower. When
workers attempted to unionize in 1983, Phelps Dodge, following the prevailing
anti-union sentiment of the Reagan administration, bought in non-union workers
from outside Ajo, but the days of the mine were already numbered. Phelps Dodge
shuttered operations in 1985.
Today, there is a new set of
borders in Ajo. They are harder to define because many of them are no longer
based on geography, race or economics. New housing for Border Patrol families sits
next to winter homes of snowbirds. Edgy’s REB Supply is across the street from
the American Citizens Club, which, contrarily to our current perception of the
name, was founded by, and is still mainly a meeting place for, Mexican
Americans. Humanitarian Aid workers and Border Patrol agents park next to each
other at Olsen’s grocery store. Year-round and part-time residents gather at
the library to use the wifi. Despite their physical proximity, borders are ever
present and seemingly more insurmountable between them than the fence that
marks the arbitrary boundary between the US and Mexico.
Nearly 200 years since Gadsden
cut their land in half, the Tohono O’odham are still fighting to re-unify their
Nation. If we continue to create more and more literal and figurative borders
between us, will our children and their children still be fighting to break
them down in 2220? Better, perhaps, to remove them now. #sinfronteras
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