In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town's Anglos, furious at this "interracial" transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes.

The Great Arizona Orphan Abductiontells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation of racial boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a "wild West" boomtown, where the mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became big business and whiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced passions that erupted in the "orphan incident." To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue.

Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their church and asserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to "save" the orphans, and they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda Gordon brilliantly recreates and dissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story that resonates with today's conflicts over the "best interests of the child."

Gordon demonstrates the continuing vitality of the issues social historians have brought to the table — class, race, gender, family — in the context of a new commitment to a synthesizing narrative…Gordon's invocations of the many issues that have concerned social historians deeply enhances her examination of a particular time and place in this richly re-imagined history…Gordon has gone to such pains to guard the integrity of her historical subjects and to invest then with genuine depth and individuality.

[A] fascinating, almost cinematic book...Gordon has brilliantly retrieved history, in the process providing a vivid, complex addition to the growing scholarship on 'whiteness.'

Linda Gordon has written an astonishing book...This is not just a story about orphan children: it is a story of America at a time of transition, when the railroads were opening up the land and men went west from the cities of the eastern seaboard to seek their fortune. It details religious prejudice, but also compassion.

Gordon's account takes place in six scenes, with historical interludes between them. Her narrative voice is enticing, and her descriptions vivid...This book provides a gripping piece of a puzzled history, not only of American racism, but of the Catholic experience of it.

Gordon is genuinely curious and deeply thoughtful about the complex ways in which race, class and gender intersect to produce pivotal moments like this one. The book that she has written should be of interest notonly to scholars of the American southwest, but to anyone curious about how ideologies make us what we are.

Linda Gordon…has produced a brilliant foray into social history that explores issues of race, class, gender, law enforcement, and labor relations in the American Southwest at the dawn of the 20th century.

Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abductionis a spellbinding narrative history--the kind of rigorous but engaging work that other academics dream of writing. Gordon here unearths a long forgotten story about abandoned Irish-Catholic children in turn-of-the-century New York who were sent out to Arizona to be adopted by good Catholic families. The hitch was that those families turned out to be dark-skinned Mexicans. What ensued was a custody battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The astonishing story Gordon has recovered considers vexed intellectual questions about race, class and gender in a dramatic, accessible fashion.

A story of racism, vigilantism, and injustice that retains its grim fascination after nearly a century...The sordid but suspenseful story is told against a background that encompasses the mining industry, labor unions and even a waffling U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1904, a group of New York nuns delivered 40 mostly Irish but entirely Catholic orphans to a remote Arizona mining town to be adopted by local Catholics. What happened next is the subject of historian Linda Gordon's compelling new book: For their act of Christian charity, the nuns were rewarded with near-lynching and public vilification of an intensity hard to fathom today. As Gordon makes clear in writing so alive it makes the reader smell sagebrush and white supremacy, the Eastern nuns didn't realize that, in turn-of-the-century Arizona, Catholic also meant Mexican, and Mexican meant inferior.

Historian Linda Gordon has unearthed a small, forgotten story, and told it exceptionally well...[The] astonishing story, less than a century old, contains much to ponder. Gordon does a masterful job probing class and race, gender and religion, family and border economics to shed light on conflicts unresolved to this day...She has crafted both an exhilarating yarn and a sober morality tale.

In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town'sAnglos, furious at this "interracial" transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, includingthe U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes.

The Great Arizona Orphan Abductiontells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation ofracial boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a "wild West" boomtown, where the mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became big business andwhiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced passions that erupted in the "orphan incident." To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child with a Mexican family wastantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue.

Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their church andasserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to "save" the orphans, and they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda Gordon brilliantly recreates anddissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story that resonates with today's conflicts over the "best interests of the child."

Linda Gordonis Professor of History at <>New York University. She is the author of the now classic history of birth controlin America, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, and of Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, winner of the Joan Kelly Prize for the bestbook in women's history.

Preface

Cast of Principal Characters

October 2, 1904, Night: North Clifton, Arizona

September 25, 1904: Grand Central Station, New York City

1. King Copper
October 1, 1904, 6:30 p.m.: Clifton Railroad Station

2. Mexicans Come to the Mines
October 1, 1904, around 7:30 p.m.: Sacred Heart Church, Clifton

3. The Priest in the Mexican Camp
October 2, 1904, Afternoon: Morenci Square and Clifton Library Hall

4. The Mexican Mothers and the Mexican Town
October 2, 1904, Evening: The Hills of Clifton

5. The Anglo Mothers and the Company Town
October 2, 1904, Night: Clifton Hotel

6. The Strike
October 3-4, 1904: Clifton Drugstore and Library Hall, Morenci Hotel

7. Vigilantism
January 1905: Courtroom of the Arizona Territorial Supreme Court, Phoenix

8. Family and Race

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Maps
Sonoran Highlands Mining Region in 1903
Old Clifton and Morenci