Film Screening and Discussion of Bisbee '17
Film Screening and Discussion of Bisbee '17
Please join us for a Film Screening and Discussion of Bisbee '17 in advance of the Remembering Historical Violence Symposium on Saturday, April 18.
Friday, Apr 17, 3:30-6:00pm
Discussant: Katherine Benton-Cohen, Georgetown University
FILM SYNOPSIS:
On July 12, 1917, three months after US entry into World War I and several years into the Mexican Revolution, two thousand recently appointed “deputies” and the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, hoisted rifles to their sides and donned white armbands. The men then proceeded to round up at least 1200 striking miners–ninety percent of them immigrants–from the booming copper town of Bisbee, Arizona, load them onto a company-owned railroad and ship them into the middle of the New Mexico desert. The event became known as the Bisbee Deportation, and it was one of the largest armed responses to a labor strike in US history. Two men died in the conflict, some of the men stayed for nearly two months at a US Army Camp where they were deposited, and most never returned to the town because they were blacklisted. The event made front-page news across the country and prompted a federal investigation which included a young Felix Frankfurter. Almost 100 years later, local community activists and historians tackled the issue of how to remember this divisive event, which had been spoken of only in whispers. Through creative roleplay and re-enactments, the community rehashes the past, “deportation,” and what it might have to do with the present in a town eight miles from the US border.