Bisbee, Arizona was once a thriving copper mining town — until 1917, when over a thousand striking miners and their supporters were rounded up at gunpoint, loaded into cattle cars, and deported to the New Mexico desert. In The Ghosts of Bisbee, Eric Margolis and Mary Romero revisit this largely forgotten episode of American labor history, examining how the memory of the Bisbee Deportation haunts the town and the nation.
The article combines historical research with visual documentation to explore how places carry the traces of past violence, and how communities choose to remember or forget the conflicts that shaped them. The authors find in Bisbee a microcosm of larger American struggles over labor rights, corporate power, and the suppression of dissent.
Cite This Work
Eric Margolis and Mary Romero (2019). The Ghosts of Bisbee.
