There is a small mining town in the copper belt desert of southeastern Arizona, with a majority Latino population.
Clifton, Arizona is a town of about 4,000 people that is primarily fueled by the Morenci Mine, one of the largest copper mines in the country.
Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote about this in a recent column as he drove through the Southwest talking to Latinos ahead of next week’s election.
Arellano said this is part of a long history of Mexican Americans living and working in the mines in that part of Arizona, a story that has never really been told. His grandparents were among them.
whole conversation
Gustavo Arellano: As I wrote in my column, to go to Clifton you really have to want to be there. From Wilcox, you take I-10, take Interstate 191, enter Safford, and start heading east, up, up, up, past Acotillo, past creosote bushes.
Next, you will see the Morenci Mine. I described it as being like the Sarlacc Monster from Return of the Jedi. You know, when you level down like this pit and you actually roll into Clifton, it becomes the Wild West right away. It is a historic district with buildings from the economic boom of the 1800s. Then the rest is, I mean, small. The population is 4,000.
Gilger: Wow, yeah. And you went there for very personal reasons, right? Your grandparents are from that area.
Arellano: Yeah, so I developed a big series for the LA Times that went around the Southwest and told different stories about Latinos in this election year. And one of the reasons I went to Clifton is that it’s right next to the now-defunct town of Metcalf, Arizona.
That’s where my maternal grandmother, Mi Mamachera, was born in 1912, and her husband, paternal grandfather, and my dad also lived there as children. So a whole generation of people from the Mexican state of Zacatecas ended up in Clifton, Morenci, and Metcalf before going to Southern California.
And it turns out that many Southern Californians have the same copper roots as my family.
Gilger: Well, there’s an interesting history there, and you write that a lot of the Mexican immigrants that came through that part of Arizona to get to Los Angeles kind of became the politics of Los Angeles.
Arellano: Oh, yeah. So these are names that are probably not very familiar to most Arizonans, but in Southern California they mean royalty. We’re talking about former City Council member Richard Alatorre and Romana Banuelos Acosta, the first-ever Latinx U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. She was born in Miami, across the street from Clifton. According to the locals, it is pronounced as “mi-ah-moo.” Esteban Torres is also from Miami. MacArthur’s genius winner Ruben Martinez was a bookstore owner. He’s also from Miami.
I knew some of the history of all these different things, but going into this story I didn’t recognize many more names. And this is interesting, after I published my column in the LA Times, a lot of people from Southern California started telling me that, yes, my family has roots in Southern California. Ta.
In other words, this is a history of migration that has never been written before.
Gilger: Yeah, that’s exactly why I found this so interesting, but of course it all has to do with the mine there, the Morenci mine that you mentioned, which is operated by Freeport-McMoRan. And what’s interesting, and I think another piece of lost history, is that this town is majority Latino, and Latinos have been here for generations. I mean, I’ve been working in the mines. And that story is often left untold. When you think of American mines, you think of Appalachia.
Arellano: Yeah, you think about coal miners, you think about Eastern European people working in Pennsylvania, you think about Italians, Hungarians, things like that. We rarely think about Latino miners in the American Southwest. That was another reason. If you want to tell a story about politics, you just want to go into politics on different levels. And mining was a huge platform for both the Trump administration and the Biden administration.
Now, Harris and Trump are both campaigning on this issue, but it hasn’t reached southeast Arizona. Even though you have very huge and important hearts for you here and there, they will not come to the copper country.
Gilger: Well, yeah, this is an interesting fact and you’re talking about the election there, but we’ll get to that in a second. But in this article I would like to talk about the profiles and profiles of people with whom you spent time. A woman who left Clifton and came back wants to tell her story. This mining Latino story brings life back to this part of the state. Please tell us about Janine Carrillo.
Arellano: Yeah, Janine Carrillo, 45, born in Morenci, a company town right next to Clifton, but after high school growing up between Clifton and Morenci, she’s like, “I’m a young woman.” . I have no future in copper mining here. I go to Phoenix, so she spent 10 years there. She was a volunteer with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department. She describes herself as a McCain Republican. I mean, she was a big fan of John McCain.
Then family became important to me and I brought her back to Clifton. And she realized that there were too many people like me, too many young people who just left home and never came back. What can we do to keep people here? So she ran. Because Clifton is a town, not a city, she initially applied to the Clifton City Council and was not accepted, but she ran and was elected in 2022. That’s one of the big problems she’s working on right now, and she’s working in a mine.
She is a guard at the mine, but she knows that eventually there will be no copper there. So what can be done for Clifton to prepare for that moment and make the mine thrive?
Gilger: Yes. And it’s this little place that seems to be having a sort of, so-called, modest resurgence. I’m thinking in the piece, and you talk to her about that effort, not just about that effort, but about that, that question, right? I’m sure everyone is wondering, why would people want to stay in a place like this, where so many people have left? What did she say about that?
Arellano: Well, Clifton, Morenci, the whole area is booming with jobs right now. So, she says, these people come from all over the country to work in the mines. And of course, this is a big comeback for Clifton, as Arizonans know about the strikes that happened there in the 1980s and brought the city to ruin. At its peak, the population was 5,000, but by the 1990 census the population had dwindled to around 1,500, and as of the 2020 census, it now stands at 4,000. And she says, look, there are so many beautiful mountains around us. A river crosses us, the San Francisco River. So how do we keep people here? This is a beautiful area, so it’s a great place for people to grow up.
And for me, coming from Southern California, Los Angeles, Orange County, her dream, if you want to be cynical, is very much like she wants to have the Boston market there. It will seem commonplace. She wants to be like McDonald’s. This is going to be a big deal for Clifton because a lot of trucks go through there.
So that means jobs, and that means tax revenue that allows for citizen investment. She wants to reopen the gym and wants to do something to keep the next generation there.
So I found her very refreshing and very positive. Because it’s very easy to hear from mining countries. It’s always a boom and a buzz. But she’s like, “No, I’m going to be in this for the long term.”
Gilger: Wow, yeah. It’s certainly a rare story. Now, let’s talk about what an election is like in a small rural area like this in Arizona. What did you notice as you walked around there and talked to people?
Arellano: Greenlee County voted for Trump in 2020. So I was expecting a lot of signs about Trump, or maybe Harris. There was a signboard in the town of Three Way. It was a big giant sign for the Greenlee County Democratic Party. I can’t remember the slogan now, but it made me laugh and I saw a lot of political signs, all for the local race for Greenlee County Sheriff. There are three candidates running for town council.
When I asked Councilwoman Carrillo about this, she said: We’re a small town, so we’re going to respect what each other votes for on a national level. But we are small and cannot compete with each other. Perhaps in large cities such battles may take place. But we care about what’s going on here. We must talk to each other as neighbors.
And this is something I’ve noticed throughout my series, that a lot of the Latinos I’ve talked to, yes, they care about national issues as well, but they care about local issues. I also really care, because local issues are more solvable than national issues if you are just one individual.
Gilger: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, I’ll leave it there for now. Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist. Let’s talk more about Clifton Arizona Gustavo. Thank you so much for coming to talk to me about this.
Arellano: Thanks for having me.
