Just at the intersection of New Mexico highways 152 and 356, the Santa Rita Shrine sits tucked in a battlefield of dying mining towns, a lone structure reminiscent of one of the largest mining communities in the Southwest. Santa Rita was once the townsite for the Chino Mine, once the fourth largest copper mine in the world. In 1910, the company began open-pit mining on the edge of town. By the 1930’s, new technologies allowed the mining company to extract ore at a faster rate using fewer resources, slowly eating away at the land around Santa Rita. In 1960, Kennecott Copper, the mining company, issued a removal notice that “all houses must be cleared,” and by 1970, the town was gone.
Despite a complete loss of space, the citizens of Santa Rita maintain strong communal ties through their shared sense of home. They regularly attend reunions of many kinds; they show up in mass support when a fellow Santa Ritan loses a family member; They are a tight-knit group of people.
Inspired by the resilience of Santa Ritians, Into Space: Public Memory in New Mexico’s Central Mining District is a series of short documentaries—chapters, if you will—that tell the many stories about how Santa Ritians came to be such a close community. It’s a case study investigating how groups of people maintain a sense of community despite the loss of home—a loss of a physical space in which to gather, remember, and celebrate a shared past. The documentaries explore the history of Santa Rita, including the good and the bad. In creating these films, I hope to create a space for Santa Ritians to share the faces, objects, and stories about Santa Rita with their friends and family.
Santa Rita Films
