A tiny town in Arizona’s copper country is having a comeback — largely due to Latinos

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A tiny mining town sits in the desert in southeastern Arizona's copper country — and it’s dominated by Latinos.

Clifton, Arizona, is a town of about 4,000 people that’s largely fueled by the Morenci Mine, one of the largest copper mines in the country.

Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote about it in a recent column as he drove across the Southwest talking to Latinos leading up to next week’s election.

Arellano said it’s part of a long history of Mexican Americans who have lived in that part of Arizona and worked in the mine — and whose stories have never really been told. His grandparents were among them.

Full conversation GUSTAVO ARELLANO: As I wrote in my column, to get to Clifton, you really have to want to get there. So from Wilcox off the 10, you go up in I-191 you get into Safford, you start going east, going up, up, up, you pass by acotillo, you pass by creosote bushes, all of that.

Then you see the Morenci mine, which I described as like the Sarlacc monster from “Return of the Jedi.” You know, like this pit with levels coming down and then once you actually roll into Clifton, it's immediately Wild West. They have a historic district buildings from the 1800s from its boom days. Then the rest of it, it's, I mean, it's tiny. We're talking about a population of 4,000 people.

GILGER: Wow, yeah. And you went there for a very personal reason, right. Your grandparents are from that area.

ARELLANO: Yeah, so I did a big series for the LA Times where I went around the Southwest, just telling different stories about Latinos in this election year. And one of the reasons why I went to Clifton is that it's right next to a town that no longer exists, Metcalf, Arizona.

That's where my maternal grandmother, mi mamachela, that's where she was born in 1912 and her husband, my paternal grandpa, my papa, hey, he lived there as a kid as well. And so you had an entire generation of people from our part of Mexico, Zacatecas who ended up in Clifton, Morenci and Metcalf before they went to Southern California.

And that turned out to be a lot of Southern Californians had those same copper roots as my family did.

GILGER: Right, and so there's this interesting history there and then you write that a lot of those Mexican immigrants who kind of went through that part of Arizona who ended up in LA have ended up in kind of LA politics.

ARELLANO: Oh, yeah. So these are names that are not really familiar, probably to most Arizonans, but in southern California the royalties. We're talking about former council member Richard Alatorre, Romana Banuelos Acosta, who was the first ever Latina U.S. treasurer. She was born in Miami — or as the locals tell me to pronounce it “Mi-aa-muh” — which is on the other side of Clifton. Esteban Torres also from Miami. You have a MacArthur genius winner Ruben Martinez who had a bookstore owner. He's also from Miami.

And so all these different things and I knew some of that history but going into into this, I didn't realize even more names. And this is an interesting thing after I published my LA Times column I'm getting a lot of people from Southern California saying yes, my family also had roots there.

So it's a migration history that really no one has ever written about until now.

GILGER: Right, exactly why I found it so interesting, but it's all of course connected to the mine there, the Morenci mine you mentioned run by Freeport-McMoRan. And, and what's interesting and another kind of piece of lost history I think is that this is a town that's majority Latino that Latinos have worked at this mine for generations. And that story is often not told. Like when you think about mining in America, you think about, you know, like Appalachia.

ARELLANO: Yeah, you think about coal miners, you think about eastern Europeans working out in Pennsylvania, in, you know, Italians, Hungarians and all that. You almost never think of Latino miners in the American Southwest. And so that was another reason, you know, if you want to tell a story about politics, you just want to get into it into different levels. And mining was such a big platform for the Trump administration and also the Biden administration.

Now, Harris and Trump, they're both campaigning on that issue, but they're not coming down to southeastern Arizona. They're not coming to copper country, even though you have such a humongous and important mind down here or down there for you folks.

GILGER: Right, right so that's an interesting fact of this and you talk about the election there, which we'll get to in a second. But I want to talk about someone you spent some time with and kind of profile in this piece. A woman from Clifton who left and came back, who wants to tell that story, right. That story of Latinos in this mine and bring some life back to this part of the state. Tell us about Janine Carrillo.

ARELLANO: Yeah, Janine Carrillo, 45 years old, born in the company town of Morenci, which is right next to Clifton, but grew up between both Clifton and Morenci once she graduates from high school, she's like, I'm a young woman here there's no future for me in copper mining. I'm going off to Phoenix, so she spent a decade there. She was a volunteer with Maricopa County, a Sheriff's department. She describes herself as a McCain Republican. So she was a big fan of John McCain.

Then family matters, takes her back to Clifton and she realizes, you know, there's too many people like me, too many young people who just leave and never come back. What can I do to make it so that people remain here? So she ran. She originally applied for the Clifton Town Council because Clifton is a town, not a city was not accepted, but in 2022 she ran and she won. So that's one of the big questions she's wrestling with now and she works for the mine.

She's a security guard for the mine but she knows that eventually there's not going to be copper there anymore, so what can she do to prepare for that moment for Clifton and make it a thriving place.

GILGER: Right. And it's this tiny place, but it does seem to be having some kind of, you know, moderate comeback as you call it. I think in the piece and you talk to her about, about that effort, but also about that, that question, right? That I think all of us would wonder, which is why would people want to stay in a place like this that so many people have left? What did she have to say about that?

ARELLANO: Well right now Clifton, Morenci that whole area is booming with jobs. And so she's saying that you have all these people coming from across the country to work at the mine. And it's a big comeback for Clifton of course, Arizonans know about the strike that happened down there in the 1980’s that sent the city into a downfall. The population at its height was 5,000 went down to like 1,500 I believe by the 1990 census, the 2020 census has it now at 4,000 people. And so she says, look, we are, there's so many beautiful mountains around us. There's a river, the San Francisco river that crosses through us. So what can we do to keep people here? Because this is a beautiful area, it's a wonderful place for people to grow up in.

And for me as coming from Southern California, from Los Angeles, Orange County, her dreams, if I wanted to be cynical, they would seem very trite like she wants to get a Boston market in there. She wants to get like a McDonald's. This would be a huge thing for Clifton because a lot of trucks drive through there.

So that means jobs, that means a tax revenue that then allows for civic investment. Like she wants to reopen a gym and she wants to do things to keep that next generation there.

So I just found her so, so refreshing and and so positive because it's so easy to when you get stories from mining country. It's always boom and buzz. But she's like, no, I'm in this for the long run.

GILGER: Wow, yeah. A rare story for sure. OK, so let's talk about what the election looks like in this kind of small piece of rural Arizona. What did you find when you walked around there and talked to folks?

ARELLANO: Greenlee County voted for Trump in 2020. So I expected a lot of signs about Trump or maybe Harris. There was one sign in the town of Three Way. It was a big huge billboard for the Greenlee County Democratic Party. And I can't remember its slogan right now, but it made me laugh and I saw a lot of political signs but they were all for local elections for Greenlee County sheriff. There's like three candidates running there for the town council.

And I asked the Councilmember Carillo about that and she said, look, we're a small town like we're going to respect what each other votes for on the national level. But we can't be pitted against each other because we're tiny. Maybe on the big city, then you could have those fights. But we care about what's going on here. We have to talk to each other as neighbors.

And that's something that I found in my overall series was that a lot of the Latinos that I talked to, they, yes, they care about national issues, but they really care about the local matters because local is what you can fix far more so than national issues if you're just one individual.

GILGER: Right, that makes a lot of sense. All right, we'll leave it there for now. Gustavo Arellano, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Joining us to talk more about Clifton Arizona Gustavo. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about this, I really appreciate it.

ARELLANO: Gracias for having me.

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