Bisbee ’17
Something bad happened in Bisbee, Ariz., a century ago. Something that haunts the town to this day. Well, sort of. An interesting if unfulfilling documentary experiment, Robert Greene’s “Bisbee ’17,” about the town’s reckoning with a deadly and illegal mass deportation through a re-enactment on the 100th anniversary of the event, gives us insight into history. But I was more interested in the Bisbee of today and its citizens than whom they were playing.
What happened was this: Bisbee, about 7 miles north of the Mexico border, was one of the richest copper mining towns in the world. Unfortunately, that wealth was in the control of several corporations, notably Phelps Dodge, which owned the town’s Copper Queen Mine. In an era when there was a rapidly rising demand in all areas of industrial production due to a changing world as well as World War I, workers wanted a bigger cut of the ever-expanding pie.
In Bisbee, copper mine workers — many of them immigrants — unionized, calling for a boost in pay, better safety and working conditions, and an end to discrimination. They went on strike. On July 12, 1917, a mostly white militia of townspeople and company thugs rounded up the workers at gunpoint and deported them on railroad cars to the desert. Many died and disappeared.
In the re-enactments, some of which seem to have been orchestrated by Greene himself, locals from the town of less than 6,000 are cast as the historical figures. Some of them are descendants of the actual participants, and are cast as their ancestors. We see them building sets and making clothing and props. We see them in meetings as they plan the re-enactments and discuss their interpretation of history.
(An inspiration appears to be Tombstone, Ariz., which is less than a half-hour’s drive north and is a town that makes its living off re-enactments of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.)
As “Bisbee ’17” progressed, I kept wondering about the people in today’s Bisbee. What are their lives like? Not all of them were born there. Why did they move there? As they are 7 miles from Mexico, what do they think of immigration and deportation issues? Since the copper mine closed in the 1980s, what is the main economy?
Those questions go largely unanswered. However, the reenactments are somewhat interesting. Greene makes reenactor Fernando Serrano, a young man who is ethnically Mexican and whose mom was once deported and imprisoned, the conscience of the film. He has a haunting look that Greene obviously likes.
One re-enactor gets it right when, near the end of the film, he calls it “the world’s largest group therapy session.” Certainly, “Bisbee ’17” is about ghosts, both past and present.