“And so our veterans community has always been united and has always tried to stick together. We lost a lot of people from Santa Rita during the Vietnam War. We lost a lot of people during the Second World War who were all from Santa Rita. Our first losses were Harvey Octavio, Octavio, Tabby Harvey, Antonio Esqueda, David, David. —I’m sorry. My memory is not serving me correctly at this point in time—but we lost about six people from Santa Rita, to the Vietnam War. And there were other people from Grand County, who were also lost during that period of time. We weren’t the only ones. But we suffered a larger portion of losses. Because we did not qualify to go to school, we didn’t have school deferments. Okay? And the minute that we were 18 years old, we were automatically drafted by an all white draft board in Grand County”
– Richard Torres
In this chapter, I will describe my research methods, including how I selected participants and analyzed the data. I round out this chapter with a brief explanation of my research findings. In a traditional dissertation, these findings would be explained in separate chapters, each chapter devoted to one finding. Into Space Film-book utilizes a different, less formally academic structure to present its findings. Each chapter will serve as a short film intended for the Santa Ritian community and the neighboring local communities as its audience. The online videos allow easy access for Santa Ritians to share with their friends, family, and neighbors. Thus, this chapter concludes with an abbreviated explanation of the research findings to provide readers with insight for how I selected the topics for each short documentary.
I want to move from simply analyzing sites of memory to visualizing the processes and practices of creating memory. As I describe above, I chose to analyze oral histories alongside archival material for this project in an attempt to elicit conversations about the intertextuality and multiplicity of examining collective memory. Materiality is important to collective memory, but including oral histories alongside archives allows me to analyze how ceremony and geography are also important to understanding memory. Because Santa Ritians are aging, and many have passed away, reenacting the archives allows a researcher to open “spaces for re-imagining the force and function of the archive as a living archival body” (Bentley & Lee with FARR). When I analyze how Santa Rita is remembered, I consider not only the artifacts and stories told, but also how Santa Ritians orient themselves to one another—using nicknames, remembering the last names of those who lived on their street, recalling recurring events. Further, I theorize and analyze collective memory through multimodal frameworks that consider not only what is said or written but also embodied, material, and ceremonial practices that are embedded in collective memory. In this way, I aim to bridge research in memory studies with work that advocates for the value of building relationships with a public. I hope to illustrate how Santa Ritians leverage different modes of memory—material items, story telling, ceremony, and geographic orientations—to enact collective memory. I suggest that conversations about public and collective memory could benefit from further acknowledging modes of memory as critical components of meaning making. I hope to demonstrate that memory is constantly in the state of being remade, and is an active rhetorical process.
Below, I describe how I blended qualitative social science research methods and methodologies with the methods of documentary to both study public memory of Santa Ritians and also participate in the act of making memory with the participants by producing a film. As Jacob Bricca notes in How Documentaries Work, “Documentary films are collage. Any single passage of a documentary is apt to contain material from a huge variety of sources, so it is useful for us to begin by breaking them down into their constituent parts” (11). After providing a short overview of the types of data I collected, I will briefly introduce research participants, describing how the relationships developed with my participants guide and inform my analysis and presentation of the collective memory of Santa Rita. As evidenced in Figure 1 below, the methods employed in this project yielded more than seven and a half hours of video footage, more than 500 pages of historical documents, and 80+ historical photos of Santa Rita, not including the 3 years of relationship building encompassed in the various stages of this project. My data collection processes were granted clearance from an institutional review board and also from multiple recursive cycles of consent from all participants involved in the project.
Data Collected
| Data Collected | Amount Collected | Description |
| Official Archival Material: | Gil Moore Papers, Utah State University Special Collections250 scanned pages documents Rio Grande Historical Collection, New Mexico State University80+ scanned images Jack H. Schmidt Papers, University of New Mexico37 pages of scanned documents | The Gil Moore Papers contain several letters exchanged between Gil Moore, the founder of Society of Persons born in Space, several membership rosters of the correspondence group as it was growing, and three different programs for Society of Persons Born in Space reunions. These booklets were published for people attending the reunions and contain photo collections, written memories, poems, and legends written about the town. These documents were re-enacted by local actors as well as transcribed and coded for research. The Rio Grande Historical Collection contains historical photographs of Santa Rita ranging from 1911-1963. They include mostly images of the houses and mining equipment. These images appear in the films as visual support of the findings and the narratives. The Jack H. Schmidt Papers contain letter correspondence between Jack Scmidt and other founding members. These letters were reenacted by local Tucson actors, transcribed and coded. |
| Unofficial Archival Material: | Santa Rita Archives, Silver City Library16 pages of scanned documents Chinorama Collections, various participant’s collections32 issues Interviews conducted by others25 minutes of footage Photos or scanned documents provided my participantsCome up with number after videos are done | The Santa Rita Archives is a manila folder of old newspaper articles Terry Humble curated and used to write about Santa Rita in his book Santa Rita del Cobre. It includes a few copies of newspaper articles about Santa Rita, a copy of an anthropological study of the community conducted in the 80’s, and a self-published memoir by Robert “Gabby” Gardner. These documents were reenacted by local Tucson actors, as well as transcribed and coded for research. Several of my participants had saved issues of Chinorama, the company’s monthly magazine that contained information about the mining company and the community. The magazine hosts photo contests, safety reports, celebrations of weddings and birthdays, and news articles about mining. Images of these magazines appear in the films as visual support of the findings. One article about the evacuation was re-enacted by a local Tucson actor. |
| Oral History Interviews | 4 hours and 56 minutes of footage | I video recorded oral history interviews with ten different participants, mostly taking place in their homes. The interviews were semi-structured. These interviews were transcribed and coded. |
| B-roll | 2 hours 37 minutes of footage | This footage was taken of the surrounding area: the Kneeling Nun, the Santa Rita Shrine, the 100-wells cemetery, and footage of the front of my participant’s homes. I also recorded a tour of the area given to me by a community liaison, Frances Gonzales whose father was born and raised in Santa Rita. These images appear in the films as visual support of the findings. |
Figure 1: This chart shows the raw materials used to create the documentaries and details which materials were coded for the sake of research. It also documents which materials were used in the film to support the narratives of the findings.
The Participants
I selected 10 interview participants for the initial study, and at first I faced some challenges recruiting them. When I began the project in October 2020, we were living at the height of the pandemic, and I did not feel comfortable asking elderly people to spend time talking to a stranger. When restrictions began to ease, I was still left with the question about how to meet people from Santa Rita. At first, I tried reaching out to the Facebook Group, “Santa Rita Born in Space.” However, I had no luck. At times, I found Santa Ritians who were eager to talk to me about their experiences, but were not willing to interview on camera. I was aware that my positionality as a white academic framed me as an outsider to the community. Because of tense racial and political relations in Grant County, as I describe in Chapter 1, participants were hesitant to talk to someone they did not know. They also did not want to publicly voice an opinion that might be too controversial. Some locals expressed concerns about having an Arizona license plate in their driveway. As an outsider, I made cold calls and faced a few questions about how I would use the footage from the interviews.
After spending some time in Grant County and building relationships with my participants, this process got easier. To aid me in identifying more participants, I use the snowball or networking technique, where some of my participants began referring me to their friends and family members who were “good talkers.” In particular, my participant Richard Torres was instrumental in setting up interviews with other participants. After his oral history interview, he took the time to write down the names of local people who might be interested in interviewing, and he called them to gauge their interest in the project before I reached out to them. I asked him to help me find people who lived in the local area and are actively involved in community events. I met with my ten participants over the course of two and a half years and four trips to New Mexico. Each time I traveled back to New Mexico, I tried to connect with my participants to give them a copy of their interview to review and spend time with them.
I have chosen 10 participants using purposeful sampling—all of the participants reflect the demographics of Santa Rita: miners, house wives, the children of local store owners, etc. I wanted to interview those who are involved in the collective memory of Santa Rita—people who actively attend reunions, visit the local shrine, and attend memorial events. I selected participants who had lived in Santa Rita for at least 10 years and who are members of the working class. In addition to class, race and gender proved to be an important aspect of purposeful sampling.
Each person I interviewed, without prompt, mentioned race, or gender, or both, were markers of oppression in Santa Rita. Because of this, I was specifically interested in including the voices of women of color. I want to reiterate what other scholars say about the limitations and even discriminations of feminist research. Historically, feminism has only sought power for white women (Moraga and Anzuldua; hooks, “Ain’t I a Woman”, “The Combahee River Collective Statement”, Beck). Crenshaw says “the value of feminist theory to Black women [and other women of color] is diminished because it evolves from a white racial context that is seldom acknowledged. Not only are women of color in fact overlooked, but their exclusion is reinforced when white women speak for and as women” (Crenshaw 154). In selecting participants I want to represent voices that have been historically marginalized. As explained in Chapter 1, the dominant memory of Santa Rita is documented through the perspective of the mining company and their magazine, Chinorama, or from the perspective of a white miner, Paul M. Jones, who wrote about his experiences in Santa Rita in a weekly news column in the 1980s. Given the different experiences in Santa Rita based on demographics, a majority of my participants are of Mexican-American and/or indigenous descent, and half of them are women. When working with minority populations, it’s important to have conversations about their comfort levels and risks with the research.
Also in line with my values as a researcher, I tried to be thoughtful of my consent and intellectual property processes. First, I completed the paperwork for an IRB exemption. At my institution, oral history projects are exempt from institutional review. However, I wanted to take the precautions and document this process regardless. Each participant got a copy of the consent form which I also read aloud to them. The consent form explains that the interviews are collected for publication on the internet, both in the form of edited documentary films and in a digital repository of oral histories from Santa Ritians and their families. I contacted each participant to try to arrange a time which best fit their schedule. This often meant planning my trips to New Mexico around their work and family trips or other obligations. Because I speak Spanish, I also invited my participants to use whatever language they felt most comfortable for the interview, although all of my participants chose to interview in English. Participants could also choose their name for the project. Though most chose their first names, others decided to use the nickname given to them by the Santa Rita community. As noted in my consent form, the interview and all of the memory material such as photos, paintings, and objects shared in the video remain the intellectual property of the participant. Participants were given a complete copy of their interview on a flash drive and told that they could review their interview and leave out any part of their oral history that they wished. I read the consent form out loud to each participant. I also let them know that they could share their interview online through social media or share it with their friends and family via the flash drive.
I invited participants to choose the location for their oral history. A majority of participants chose to conduct the interview in their home for their convenience. Consequently, filming the oral histories in their homes allowed me to document their material contexts, as I illustrate with the two images below. The items in the frame for each interview help develop the characterization of each participant, leaving an impression on the audience (Bricca How Documentaries Work 33).
Consider these two images of the participants interviewing in their homes. In the image above, Olga is sitting on her couch which is draped with a crochet throw that she made and a pillow that reads FALL, demonstrating how Olga decorates her house for the holidays. Ceramic pumpkins, sunflowers and scarecrows line the window sill behind her head. She has a picture of her son and his family on the wall behind her. These visual details tell us not only about Olga’s interests and values, but also demonstrate the material objects she surrounds herself with. In our time together, Olga told me that her husband, Archie, had recently passed away. Since his passing, she hadn’t felt like herself, and her children were concerned that she didn’t want to decorate for Halloween. She told me her son put up the few fall decorations you see in the frame. This is one example of how the objects that surround us symbolize identity in flux.
In contrast to Olga, Terry (below) is seated in his library with shelves of books and magazines behind him that affirm his appointed title as the town historian. He has skins of an Alpaca on the wall to the left of him, and a homemade sign from his former colleagues when he lived and worked in Peru. By showing my participants in their homes, I wanted to present them in their daily material contexts.
Shooting the interviews in the location of their choice was not always to my advantage. In fact, doing so goes against the advice to shoot interviews with similar backgrounds as suggested by Bricca who says, “if all interviews carry visual commonalities by shooting them under similar conditions in a studio, this tamps down the sense of chaos and arbitrariness that can quickly overwhelm the visual universe of a documentary” (How Documentaries Work 29). By allowing the interviewees to choose where they interview, I not only invite a ‘sense’ of chaos; I also increase literal chaos. Consider how the image of Ramon below contrasts with the image of Sookie sitting in her living room. The visual disparities between the parking lot of a beauty shop and the harsh contrast of the glaring sun and a tidy, well-decorated living room in the evening. Since I met Ramon at the beauty shop, I also lost control of the interview space.
Halfway through the interview, the hairdresser came out to the parking lot and asked me if she could move her truck and go home. We had to pause the interview to move from one spot, where Ramon was leaning against her truck, to this spot pictured above in the sun where he was leaning against his car. We quickly started getting hot and had to stop the interview again to cool off in the car. My interview with Sookie was not as unpredictable, but I realized when I got home that you can hear the television playing in the background of her interview. Had I taken better control of the interview locations, these interviews would have contained more visual continuity and better sound quality.
The alignment of goals between rhetorical memory scholarship and documentary work isn’t always seamless. To address this disparity, my decision to film interviews in participant-selected locations aimed to dismantle entry barriers for interviewees while fostering a sense of comfort during their conversations. As noted above, the physical space of interaction creates visual and auditory experiences for the audience. Elements like visual cues, the surrounding environment, and even ambient sounds like traffic and television collectively contribute to enhancing perception and forging connections between interviewees, interviewers, and viewers, even when there are issues with sound and lighting. In considering the primary audience, the Santa Rita community, the familiarity of seeing fellow community members within their habitual settings could also resonate with their own memories. This is one example of how my feminist rhetorical research methods were sometimes in conflict with the medium I chose. The project inherently navigates a delicate balance between film quality and research integrity, urging me to refine these competencies and devise processes that harmonize scholarly rigor with elevated production standards.
Overview of Participants
Having discussed the rationale behind my decision to conduct interviews in participant-selected locations and the implications for the overall documentary experience, I want to shift focus towards demographics and biographical details of the participants. This brief overview of the participants allows for a basic understanding of the perspectives that contribute to the intersectional identities of the memory Santa Rita. In this section, I will briefly introduce the participants and provide a link to both their full interview as well as the documentaries they appear in. They are listed in the order by which I interviewed each participant, and they are listed by their first names or the nickname by which they introduced themselves to me. It’s important to note that the table below is a living document, evolving as I continue to create and develop the films. This dynamic approach ensures that the participant profiles remain current and reflective of the ongoing progress in the project.
| Name | Interview Date | Years in Santa Rita | Age when they left Santa Rita | Primary Occupation | Link to Oral History | Film Appearances |
| Olga | October 2021 | 1941-1961 | 20 | Homemaker | 📹 | Moving the Houses |
| Sookie | March 2022 | 1948-1967 | 19 | Homemaker and retired jewelry store clerk | 📹 | |
| Terry | April 2022 | 18 | Retired miner | 📹 | Moving the Houses | |
| Ramon | April 2022 | 1942-1963 | 21 | Retired Miner | 📹 | |
| Richard | February 2023 | 1950-1962 | 12 | Retired Accountant and Business Consultant | 📹 | |
| MaryAnn | June 2023 | 1957-1967 | 10 | Probate Judge | 📹 | Moving the Houses |
| Cuca | June 2023 | 1943-1959 | 16 | Unknown | 📹 | |
| Johnny | June 2023 | 1942-1970 | 28 | Unknown | 📹 | Moving the Houses |
| Esther | June 2023 | 1950-1966 | 16 | Retired Miner | 📹 | |
| Larry | June 2023 | -1967 | 14 or 15 | Retired Mine Supervisor | 📹 |
Figure 6: a chart of the participants’ biographical information including the date of the interview, the years they lived in Santa Rita, their age when they left, their primary occupation, a link to their oral history interview and a link to the films in which they appear.
I want to highlight that most of my interviewees identify as “the younger generation” of Santa Ritians. My participants were children, teenagers, or young adults when they left Santa Rita, and most of the Santa Ritians who lived there as adults have already passed away. As I began this research project, several participants, namely Olga and Terry, told me that I should have started this project before the pandemic since several Santa Ritians were lost to Covid-19 in 2020. In their interviews, many of the participants mention mortality as a force that actively deteriorates this community and its memory. In her interview, MaryAnn mentions that many of the members of the community who were so active in organizing reunion events are already gone. Likewise, my community liaison, Frances Gonzales, whose father was raised in Santa Rita, notes how the knowledge of community organizing and solidarity is fading as each “Old Timer” passess away (personal interaction). For this reason, I believe it’s imperative to collect these oral histories. Even the younger generation of Santa Ritians is aging.
It is worth noting that even after this project is defended and published, I will continue adding oral histories, and developing this project over time. I am aware of other Santa Ritans who would like to participate but live further away. Other Santa Ritans still wanted to participate, but life circumstances prevented us from connecting for an interview. I am vested in this project as an ongoing repository for interviews and a space of public memory. However, like any project with an end date in mind, I had to decide when enough data was collected to move on to the next phase.
Interview Processes
The data collection and coding process for Into Space Film-book was not linear. I coded interviews as I recorded them, and made adjustments to the process as I went along. Like other parts of the data collection process, the interview questions have evolved over time with the input of my participants and the need to create narrative-driven films. I developed my initial interview questions directly from my research questions. My initial interview questions were:
- How do you remember the town or what do you remember about the town?
- How would you describe your connection to other people from Santa Rita?
- How do you cope with the loss of your home?
- Can you share mementos or objects that remind you of Santa Rita and talk a bit about them?
I wanted to capture both what participants remember about the town and the collaborative rhetorical practices they use to construct a memory of the town. Before I began interviewing, I consulted Terry Humble about what interview questions he thought would be most interesting for other Santa Ritians to know. Terry is locally known as the town historian because he wrote a book called Santa Rita del Cobre: A Copper Mining Community in New Mexico, and he is currently the president of The Society of Persons Born in Space, a correspondence group of people who were born or raised in Santa Rita. As an active member of the Santa Rita community, I value his insight and assistance. Terry suggested adding the following questions:
- What part of Santa Rita are you from? – Terry suggested that different parts of town were designated to different demographics of people, and I might find it interesting to document how experiences of the town varied based on their neighborhoods. He also explained that Santa Ritians delight in knowing where each person lived in the town because they can reasonably determine what other community members they might have known.
- Apart from the Santa Rita Shrine and the Kneeling Nun, are there other important places for people to remember the town? – As an interpretive question, this question provides additional information on data I found in the archival materials. Terry noted that these places would come up often in my interviews, and my research might benefit from looking into other sites of memory.
I am grateful for Terry’s insight and added these questions to my interviews. In particular, the question about neighborhoods has been illuminating, as many participants can recall their address, nearby stores, names of their neighbors and the like. They are excited to talk about their particular neighborhoods.
Talking about what parts of Santa Rita the participants are from has also created space for participants to talk about class and privilege without having to ask pointed questions. As an example, Esther responds to the question, “What part of Santa Rita are you from”:
I lived in the hill, where my grandparents, what you call the Neighborhood of the Canyon, but I didn’t live on the canyon. I lived up the hill from the canyon. And my grandpa lived there in a two-story house. Then our house was there. Up the hill was my uncle Ramon, which is Monchi. Further down was my Uncle Cruz. And then you go down because we just had dirt roads. Except the main road was paved, but mostly it was dirt roads.
From her response, I learn that the layout of the town was integral to their relationships to one another. MaryAnn not only points out the geography of the town (canyons, hills, and dirt roads), but also the paths she took in her daily life to interact with family. I can also get a sense of middle class life in Santa Rita. Since her grandfather had a two story house, they probably had more money than other families. Still, they lived in a part of town where roads were largely unpaved.
In contrast to Esther’s response, Richard talks about changing neighborhoods when his family began to prosper economically. He responds:
I am from the new houses, which is on Georgetown Road…Okay, I am from the Georgetown Road area, near the 700-well. Our neighbors were all Hispanic. We did not have any Anglos in our neighborhood. But other neighborhoods were completely White with no Mexicans in them–a complete separation. Absolutely complete separation. My father was one of those lucky ones. He ended up working as a timekeeper in the offices in Hurley, actually had started as a warehouseman in Santa Rita, and ended up working as a timekeeper in the Hurley offices. One of only three other Mexicans working in the Hurley offices under the controller’s Department, under the direct tutelage of John B. Fraser, who also lived on Georgetown Road in Santa Rita. The first house that we had was a little cabin, and I was within 400 yards of where my grandpa and my grandma Ojinaga lived. My dad had the opportunity to buy the house here in 1955. So we moved from that apartment to this house in 1955.
Before his father got the job in the controller’s office, Richard and his family lived in an apartment in the “buncas,” the military style bunk houses where Mexican American miners with a modest income lived with their families. Richard explains exactly what Terry suggested—the neighborhoods were segregated by race and class, and consequently memories of Santa Rita vary based on neighborhood. Adding these questions creates a richer narrative and deeper understanding of the memory of Santa Rita
I also had to adjust my interviewing questions and techniques to create narrative-driven documentaries. Based on techniques I learned from my documentary production classes, all interviews began by asking participants to state their full name, however they would like to be known in the film, in a complete sentence. This allows me to introduce each participant as a developing character in the films. I also had to coach interview participants before beginning the interview to inform them about the awkward pauses in communication that they would experience during the interview—much longer than what happens in a typical conversation. The quiet times in between my questions and their answers is beneficial for film editing. Leaving this pause also allows me to film some of their emotional reactions or body language in their responses. Some participants were more comfortable with this pause than others. Esther, by example, would try to fill the space anyway. “Okay,” she says, “next question?” For other participants, this technique allowed me to film intimate moments of reflection. One such moment occurs at the end of my interview with Cuca. After a brief silence, she begins to cry. Her gaze shifts from looking at the camera to looking at me: “So it’s fascinating. I get emotional about this” she says, as tears roll down her face.
As I began interviewing participants, I also realized how creating a film changed the kind of information I would need to develop a narrative. As an example, I would need footage of an interview participant explaining what happened to the town and why it was evacuated. I began adding questions I knew I would need for a story. My later participants answered “If someone had never heard of Santa Rita, how would you describe it?” and “What happened to the town?” In this way, the genre of documentary changed the questions that I began asking and made the interview process slightly less systematic than a traditional qualitative research study. However, it also allowed me to be more flexible with the interview process which proved beneficial for building relationships with the participants.
Each participant’s interview had its own strengths and focuses. Some interview participants were eager to tell stories and had a particular angle they wanted to focus on. Richard, for example, wanted to talk about the Empire Zinc Mine Strikes and the importance of the local 890 union. Sookie was eager to talk about a generational shift in values and what cultural practices from Santa Rita she hopes to pass on to her children. Other interviewees such as Cuca and Larry stuck close to the questions I asked. Regardless, each interview seemed to offer a theme as demonstrated below in figure 7.
Emerging Themes
| Name | Years in Santa Rita | Age when they left Santa Rita | Neighborhood | Emerging Themes |
| Olga | 1941-1961 | 20 | Georgetown Rd, House #1398, PO Box # 614 | inequality, religious ceremonies, Catholicism, |
| Sookie | 1948-1967 | 19 | Casas Nuevas | generational shift, crowdsourcing resources, Santa Rita Houses |
| Terry | 18 | Iron Hill | saved objects, Santa Rita Houses | |
| Ramon | 1942-1963 | 21 | Mexican Town | Inequality, Racism |
| Richard | 1950-1962 | 12 | New Houses, Georgetown Rd. | The Union, Salt of the Earth, military affiliations |
| MaryAnn | 1957-1967 | 10 | Under the Kneeling Nun | The Kneeling Nun, nicknames, Santa Rita houses |
| Cuca | 1943-1959 | 16 | house # 1123, PO box # 518 | town amenities, generational shift |
| Johnny | 1942-1970 | 28 | Near the Catholic Church, Georgetown Rd. | The Shrine, Society of Persons Born in Space, The Community Church |
| Esther | 1950-1966 | 16 | The Canyon | gender difference, the union, generational shifts |
| Larry | -1967 | 14 or 15 | Buncas, Santa Rita Hill | Company Control |
One such theme that emerged early was “military affiliation” as I precoded Olga’s interview. She discussed the shift in Grant County when “the boys” came home. She told me that “the boys” were no longer willing to cope with discrimination. I took this information and began looking back at the archival material I had collected, and started looking for information about who “the boys” were, and where they came home from. Through reiterative coding, and by asking questions of my participants outside of interviews, I learned that “the boys” were those who served in World War II. Grant County, NM suffered the greatest number of lives lost during World War II—more than any other county in the United States. As I attended the rededication ceremony of the Bataan Memorial Park in Santa Clara, New Mexico, I learned that “Out of the 1,816 New Mexico National Guardsmen sent to defend the Philippines, 829 never returned home” (McDonough citing New Mexico US Senator Senator Ben Ray Luján). It makes sense that such a great loss would weigh heavy on the memory of the community and spark a change in attitudes about discrimination.
I tell this story about one of the many themes that emerged, because stories and storytelling were central to my methodological process. As Legg and Sullivan explain in “Storytelling as a Balancing Practice in the Study of Post-human Praxis,” feminist researchers often use stories as a method of data collection, but storytelling itself is often lost in the methods of the research. As stories become coded, they are turned into data, such that individual threads of story are often lost. When I began this project, I did not imagine that the military history of the area would play such a role in my findings. However, early and recursive coding allowed me to follow themes as they emerged. I believe that when you honor the individual stories, you honor the participants’ own memory making. One of the goals of using documentary film-making as a rhetorical feminist practice is to honor the individual threads of storytelling.
Coding Process
Almost immediately after my first interview, I began coding the data. First, I ran each interview through transcription software, and revised the transcripts one time before uploading them to my coding software. For archival material, I uploaded it directly to the coding software. I began by looking for answers to my research questions, and highlighting any phrases that seem to answer the questions. These “in vivo” codes, later become initial codes, as I went back and tried to refine their patterns. As noted above in figure six, there were 5 months in between my initial interview with Olga and my second interview with Sookie. During this time, I coded both Olga’s interview and the archival data. I wanted to make sure that information I found within my interviews could be confirmed or explored in additional interviews. One of the themes that occurred early in the initial interviews was the importance of “Santa Rita houses” or houses that were moved from Santa Rita to nearby towns. Another theme that emerged in the coding process that I was able to explore in later interviews is the importance of nicknames. Everyone in Santa Rita had a nickname, and several of my participants referred to others in the town by that nickname, sometimes not knowing their given name. In later interviews, I began asking participants about their nicknames. By coding after each round of interviews, I was able to ask about some of these rhetorical practices in subsequent interviews.
I also coded in several cycles. I am indebted to Kristen Hoggatt Abader for all of her help in coding my interviews. We each coded the interview separately, and then compared our codes. Through these conversations, the codes became both more defined and more reliable in the information they contained. Some of my early code, such as “company control” remained consistent and representative across all of the iterations of coding. Others, such as “nostalgia,” I realized were too abstract by later stages in the coding process. This experience is harmonious with how Saldaña describes the coding process: “As you code and recode, expect – or rather, strive for – your codes and categories to become more refined and, depending on your methodological approach, more conceptual and abstract” (12). Each time we discovered a new code, I would go back and look for that code in previous interviews. Two of the most frequent codes, “mortality” and “generational shift” were not discovered until we were coding the last couple of interviews. When I went back to recode the previous interviews, I discovered these codes were profound across all of the interviews.
Throughout the research process, I have also kept analytical memos, or brief reflections about my encounters with participants and feelings about the research process. According to Saldaña, analytical memos are “somewhat comparable to researcher journal entries or blogs – a place to ‘dump your brain’ about the participants, phenomenon, or process under investigation by thinking and thus writing and thus thinking even more about them” (44). These memos focus primarily on interactions with my participants; I reflected in a journal each time I conducted an interview or talked on the phone with a participant. The memos were particularly instrumental for helping me overcome research anxiety throughout this project.
It is worth noting that this project is not interested in producing reliable or replicable results. In “Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation,” Merriam and Tisdale explain why these characteristics are important to other types of research. They say, “reliability in a research design is based on the assumption that there is a single reality and that studying it repeatedly will yield the same results” (250). Such a notion directly conflicts with the aim, scope, and theoretical framework of this project. As explained in Chapter 1, one methodological premise to this work is centering and acknowledging a multiplicity of marginalized perspectives and identities without expecting them to align or coincide. I do not believe that a single reality exists. Furthermore, this project is founded on the belief that collective memory is not a fixed or static thing, but rather is constantly being remade and reinterpreted. Any attempt to replicate this project would do so with different participants in different temporal contexts. Thus, this case study seeks only to understand how Santa Rita may help scholars of rhetoric define the dynamics of public memory and shed light on the collaborative rhetorical practices groups may use to resist oppressive forces and maintain a collective memory.
The Data
After several rounds of coding, I identified 691 points of data across 31 different codes, which were organized into six categories as described within the tables of data below.
Codes under the category of Collaborative rhetorical practices
| Code | Number of occurrences in the data | Code description | Example |
| Religious Ceremony | 25 | This code is applied when participants talk about the ways in which religion and religious ceremonies intersect with the memory of Santa Rita. This describes both formal events held by a church and personal acts of religious ceremony, like praying. | “The only time I entertained in this house other than family was for the Posadas. And we had Posadas…But for many, many, many years, we had the Posadas. And you don’t invite people, they just come. It’s a church thing. And we, it’s a different house every night. Or maybe if we can’t get a house for that particular night, we’ll have a potluck at the church hall” (Olga’s interview). |
| Crowdsourcing | 19 | This code is applied when participants describe coming together to collectively help another member of the community. | “You know, like, now that my daughter had her surgery and she was in Colorado. You can’t imagine the cards and money that were sent to my daughter, from my friends from the people from Santa Rita. I mean, my friends from Santa Rita” (Sookie’s interview). |
| Non-religious Gatherings | 16 | This code is applied to gathering and events that were not hosted by a church and did not coincide with religion. This includes family reunions, high school reunions, and military celebrations. | “As kids went out in the summer or used to get together go for morning walks up in the hills or in the morning. And you know what? When somebody had a birthday, we would come and sing my mañanitas” (Ramon’s interview). |
| Church | 15 | This code is applied when participants mention the church as an institution. This is different from a religious ceremony because it refers more generally to a location or institution. | “The Catholic Church was a big part of our religion. My mother married into a Protestant family. So we, myself, my brother and my sister, were not a welcome part of that community. Because we had violated that sacred trust of Catholic married Catholic, okay, and you don’t change religions” (Richard’s interview). |
| Storytelling | 13 | This code is applied both when participants tell a story to illustrate a point and when they mention stories they’ve been told. | “Got a little little story to say about the Reverend Johnson. There was this man, that he’s still living, this man, Mauricio Castro. And he was telling me a story in one of the reunions, the Santa Rita reunions, he was telling me a story about the Reverend Johnson. And when he was little, his mother had been saving to buy him a red wagon for Christmas” (Johnny’s interview) |
| St. Rita | 13 | This code is applied when participants talk about Saint Rita, the patron saint of miners and lost causes. | “Even if you believe in other saints like St. Anthony, St. Jude, other saints, we all go back to St. Rita. And I have [figurines of] her all over the place. But that little one right there, my son gave me that for my birthday, maybe three years ago or something” (Olga’s interview). |
| Born in Space Reunions | 11 | This code is applied when participants talk about the Society of Persons Born in Space, a correspondence group that holds semi-regular reunions. | “Since the Born in Space group started back in the 1970s, why we’ve had a lot of reunions to where the people have gotten together. And so we’ve just got a close connection” (Terry’s interview). |
| Shared Reverence | 10 | This code is applied when a participant shows deep respect for an object, belief, person, or group of people. | “Even though I have those feelings, I’m very glad that the mine’s there because that’s our livelihood. And that mine goes down now, and I know a lot of people have a love for the kneeling nun, and so do I, and for the town, and so do I. But that’s our livelihood. If that mine shuts down and it goes away. I have one son that works at the mine. his livelihood and his family will probably have to pack up and leave” (MaryAnn’s Interview). |
As previously highlighted in Chapter 2, my research is particularly focused on collective memory, which distinguishes itself from public memory by capturing how a shared identity, molded through social interactions, influences the recollection of the past by a public. This data suggests that our understanding of rhetorical memory needs to be expanded to analyze more than material objects as they transmit memory. The table clearly demonstrates that these collaborative rhetorical practices can take various forms: some are orchestrated events, such as the reunions held under the banner of “Born in Space,” while others evolve as cultural customs, including storytelling, the singing of mañanitas, and the observance of the Posadas. During my engagement with the community members, I was struck by the significant role religion plays in shaping their memory-building processes, an observation applicable to both Catholic and Protestant participants.
Code under the category of Identity
| Code | Number of occurrences in the data | Code description | Example |
| Generational Shift | 35 | This code is applied when participants mention a shift in culture, norms, sentiment, or technology indicating that things are different for the current generation of people in Grant County. | “St. Rita will always be very special to anybody. Even generations. I think what you would have like, what is my son, second generation or my parents are first, I’m second, they’re third generation. Even they that don’t have really any emotional feelings about Santa Rita. They do for St. Rita. So it used to be the patron saint for all our miners” (Olga’s Interview). |
| Race | 25 | This code is applied when a participant mentions race, referring to themselves, others, or the organization of the town. | “There’s still a lot of discrimination going on. White people don’t feel it, but Hispanics, at least they do. It’s not as bad as it was when I was a kid. But God, when I was a kid, when we went to the movies you had to sit on the Hispanic side, whenever it was too full, if there was an empty theater and on the white side you get on that side and all the white folks sitting on that aisle would get up and walk to the other side” (Ramon’s Interview). |
| Military (eg: “the boys”) | 24 | This code is applied when participants talk about the Santa Ritians who served in the military. | “The boys that got killed in Vietnam at that time of year, the Vietnam War. And they were from Santa Rita. Their names. They have like a place for him. And they engraved all their names” (Larry’s interview, cross-coded with “Santa Rita Shrine”) |
| Family History | 21 | This code is applied when participants state who their ancestors are or describe how their family migrated to Santa Rita. | “We arrived in Santa Rita in 1923 when I was at the ripe age of four. We moved into “the yellow bungalows” perched north of the road above the Hill School on Santa Rita Hill. my father, a farm boy from Central Texas, with a knack for machinery learned while operating a steam threshing machine, graduated into drilling oil wells, (mostly wildcats), in such places as Plainview, Ranger, Crossplains and many early boomtowns” (Jones, Memories of Santa Rita). |
| Mortality | 20 | This code is applied when participants talk about death. This is applied to both conversations about the diminishing number of Santa Ritians left and also to talk about the passing of people from Santa Rita. | referring to accidents at the mine: “And in the past, our family got hit hard, because I never met my great grandfather Macario Lopez. I never met him, because I would see my great grandmother when she was a widow. And she, her father had died at the mine, which was my great grandfather” (Esther’s interview) |
| Gender | 19 | This code is applied when participants mention gender roles or the treatment of a person because of their gender. | “when I first met her, I never went anywhere without my husband. I mean, just the way we were brought up. And one day, the kids were in T-ball. And she said, “Would you like to go shopping in Las Cruces?” And I said,” Oh, my God, no. I mean, I can’t go anywhere without my husband.” She’s like, “Oh, my God, I’ve got work to do on you” (Sookie’s Interview). |
| Other Values | 17 | This code is applied when participants talk about their values or the shared values of the community. I initially coded “work ethic” and “education” in this category, but later separated them because they became pervasive patterns on their own. This category is for all other values apart from work ethic and education. | “Just something that we’ve developed and I do, I always tell my kids to always be nice and never expect to get in return. Because that’s not right” (Sookie’s interview). |
| Work Ethic | 15 | This code is applied when participants talk about the importance of work, working additional jobs, a culture of hard work, or mention work ethic directly. | “So I had three jobs from a very young age. That’s why I said and to this day. I’m a hard worker. I’m still working, I’m going to be 66. I’m still working. And I got a work ethic from Santa Rita” (MaryAnn’s interview). |
| Education | 14 | This code is applied when participants mention education systems or the importance of education | “I went to a school where I had to learn how to repair aircraft. Because the country was planning to do a program in the Pacific to go from island to island to fight the Japanese. So they needed instructors…which after school, I went to Pensacola, and I became an instructor there. And let me tell you one thing I found out, contrary to what the teacher had told me, when I went to fifth grade and told her I wanted to be a scientist or an attorney, I found out I was so much more intelligent than the rest of kids or under that it was not even funny” (Art Flores’ Interview with Puentes). |
| Class | 12 | This code is applied when a participant mentions or alludes to socioeconomic status or class. | “ They didn’t have money to buy my formula or whatever. So I was raised on carnation milk and water. And my parents would sleep in the back of the Jeep on the flatbed. And they put me on the front of the Jeep” (MaryAnn’s Interview). |
| Nicknames | 12 | This code is applied when a participant refers to someone by their nickname or talks about nicknaming in Santa Rita. | “Well, at the mine when are you worked at the mine, the co workers used to call me La Loca because I was always doing pranks on everybody to make fun of something or doing something to like, I guess pass time of day” (Larry’s interview). |
| Patriotism | 5 | This code is applied when participants mention patriotism more generally, their love of the country, or their devotion to commemorating people lost in War. | Referring to the Bataan Memorial Park rededication ceremony in 2022: “Sookie said that her uncle and her cousins are coming in from out of town in Albuquerque, and I heard they’re going to be one of the oldest veterans, it’s going to be coming in from California”(Terry’s Interview). |
| Native American | 5 | This code was applied when participants talked about Native American history in the area or being of Native American descent. Grant County is the ancestral homelands of the Chiricahua Apache and birthplace of Geronimo, or Goyaałé. This code was always co-applied along with “race.” | “In 1798, there were only the Indians living here. They were the Mimbres Apaches. They farmed the Mimbres Valley. They found the native copper at the top of the ground. They used it to make jewelry, arrow points, and plow heads. A plow point was found in the valley. It is thought they found the turquoise, that goes with copper deposits. Then the Spaniards came here from Spain. They wanted the minerals, and fought the Indians for it” (Robert Gardner’s memoir). |
As previously discussed in Chapter 1, collective memory plays a pivotal role in defining and molding the shared identity of a specific group of individuals. The stories, events, and historical narratives that are collectively recalled and commemorated hold considerable influence in establishing a cohesive sense of identity among the members of this group. From the project’s inception, my focus has been on exploring the intersectional identities of the research participants. This intersectional approach not only allows me to uncover instances of marginalization and oppression experienced by the Santa Ritians but also enables me to gain insights into the diverse strategies they employ to resist such forms of oppression.
One particularly noteworthy observation in the gathered data is the emergence of “generational” identities in response to the town’s transformation. A palpable sense of unease permeates among Santa Ritians, stemming from the passing of the older generation and the concerns of the younger generation regarding the potential erosion of their cultural identity in Santa Rita. The worry centers around the gradual detachment of their children and grandchildren from the town’s historical narratives, customs, and symbolic significance.
Codes under the category of Material Memory
| Code | Number of occurrences in the data | Code description | Example |
| Santa Rita Houses | 37 | This code was applied when participants talked about living in a Santa Rita house or the process of moving a house from Santa Rita. | “And I know he took it real hard. And I think he was steadfast from moving to Santa Rita. It was sort of scary for me when we lived there the last probably year because almost everybody was gone. Everybody. There was a few of us that trickled and stayed. And my dad was steadfast. He didn’t want to leave Santa Rita. And, but we had to, and we did, but he said I want to take a piece of Santa Rita, so we brought a house over” (MaryAnn’s Interview). |
| Kneeling Nun | 33 | This code is applied when participants mention the rock formation called “The Kneeling Nun” that used to tower over the town of Santa Rita, and still towers over the mining pit. | “Somebody just decided that was a nun. I mean, centuries ago, like When settlers first came in, and she’s been around forever. And like I tell you, we could see her because the forest has taken over and then the mine has taken over and whatever. So you can’t see her, but from our bathroom window, you could just see her and from the mine, the guys coming out or going in that, I tell you that you made the sign of the cross all the time. They, it’s just something we grew up with for generations and generations and generations” (Olga’s Interview). |
| Saved Objects | 31 | This code is applied when participants talk about preserving items from Santa Rita or about Santa Rita history. | Referring to Rev. Johnson’s journal: “When I was in the community church one day, I found it in the garbage can. I don’t know for what reason they threw it away. But if it’s got a lot of history about Santa Rita that Reverend Johnson had been keeping, and it’s got history from back to 1906” (Johnny’s interview). |
| Santa Rita Shrine | 14 | This code is applied when participants talk about the Santa Rita Shrine, a memorial of the town and people of Santa Rita. | “This shrine, from what I understand, it was done by my uncle Mike, Ojinaga, Uncle Alvarado. And there’s some other people I can’t remember who. But there were a lot of men to give them some land, and my uncle and other men from that time, they built a little shrine and put the Saint in there. And it’s been there forever” (Larry’s Interview). |
It is worth noting that the Santa Rita shrine, which acts as the official monument to the lost town, is less talked about than other material objects of memory. One of the most prominent ways in which Santa Ritians maintained a sense of community was moving their houses to other places. Those who could afford it would purchase a plot of land in another town and pay for a moving company to relocate their house, often to a street or neighborhood where friends or family members also bought plots of land. In this way, many, though not a majority, of Santa Ritians were able to curate new communities.
Adjacent to Santa Rita, the Kneeling Nun stands as another enduring monument to the town’s memory. This distinctive rock formation carries dual names: “El Cerro Del Aguja” (Needle Hill), a name supposedly given by the Apache, and “The Kneeling Nun,” given by the local Catholic community. The monolith has a legend attached to it, telling how a repenting nun was frozen in prayer. Participants also told how the miners would always make the sign of the cross as they came out of the mines and looked up at the nun. Many participants told how their house was positioned in relation to the Kneeling Nun, or how their view of the Kneeling Nun changed when they moved out of Santa Rita. For most, the sight of the Kneeling Nun triggers personal and collective memories about Santa Rita, especially as her permanence is precarious—blasts from the mine have forced the Bureau of Land Management to stabilize her with cables, and the tailings from the mine have piled so high that they now obscure the view of her from several angles.
Codes under the category of oppression
| Code | Number of occurrences in the data | Code description | Example |
| Company Control | 35 | This code is applied when participants mention the amount of control the mining company had over the community in the past or has over the community in the present. This is applied across different mining companies as different corporations sold and purchased the land (Kennecott, Chino, Freeport, etc.). | “And the combination of the fact that we lived in an area that was completely owned by the company, the land did not belong to us. The houses were houses that had been sold to us. But we were bound to a company that had the company store, the company hospital, the company, gas station, the post office, the schools, even the Catholic church that was supported by the community, Mexican American community, was still receiving donations from the Chino mines division of Kennecott Copper Corp back then. So it is my understanding that people who committed bad things in Grant County and confessed to the priest were later picked up by the police because of that relationship between the priests and the continued assistance for the church” (Richard’s interview). |
| Inequality | 30 | This code was applied when participants talked about unequal treatment because of race, gender, or class. This is often cross-coded with another code. | “Only key workers could rent a house, the Mexican American workers were discriminated against. The Anglo workers were paid more for the same job than the Mexican workers. The only jobs they would have were laborers, such as trackmen and dumpmen. At this time their pay was about $2.00 a day. They could not rent company houses, they had their part of town and built houses of anything they could find. They used old lumber, old tin, and cardboard boxes they got from the store, but they had a roof over their heads. Many of my good friends were raised in these conditions” (Robert Gardner’s Memoir). |
| Mortality | 20 | This code is applied when participants talk about members of the community that passed away or concerns about Santa Rita community members related to death. | “It’s getting a little we’re losing a lot of people from Santa Rita, you know, all the older people are passing away and so there’s not as many people that relate to” (Johnny’s interview). |
| Loss of community | 16 | This code is applied when participants refer to losing their sense of community. This is sometimes cross-coded with “mortality” as participants often talked about Santa Ritians passing away. | “Well, unfortunately, we’ve all drifted away. And we’ve all drifted apart to some extent. Even though there is quite a few people here, but everybody’s lives. Everybody grew up. They’ve had their families and been busy, but I’ll tell you what, if you go to Walmart and you meet somebody from Santa Rita, it’s a big hug” (MaryAnn’s interview). |
As emphasized in Chapter 1, the core essence of this project is firmly grounded in hope, seeking to illuminate the resilience of Santa Ritians rather than dwelling solely on their hardships. Nevertheless, comprehending how Santa Ritians confront oppression becomes more profound when we recognize the challenges they grapple with in shaping a collective memory. Furthermore, the narrative structures within documentary films demand some element of conflict. Given the historical power dynamics embedded in the town’s story, company control and inequality naturally loom large in its memory.
What may be more unexpected, however, is the prevailing anxiety among present-day Santa Ritians surrounding mortality. Participants expressed deep concern over the significant number of Santa Ritians who have passed away, underscoring the importance of attending one another’s funerals as a gesture of respect and a means to uphold community bonds. MaryAnn, in particular, conveyed the weight of these losses on Santa Ritians. Due to the loss of many older Santa Ritians, she feels compelled to be an active organizer of reunion events in the future. .
Codes under the category of place
| Code | Number of occurrences in the data | Code description | Example |
| Amenities | 13 | This code is applied when participants talk about the amenities, services, or stores that used to be in Santa Rita. The participants note that Santa Rita is unique from the other mining towns in the surrounding area, such as Hurley and Fierro, because it was a self-sufficient town. | “Well, I like it. Yeah, it had all we needed restaurants, church, whatever. And the theater was there. And motel, hotel, cafe. Our country store, little neighborhood stores” (Ramon’s interview). |
| GeographicPlace | 104 | This code is applied when participants talk about the names of particular towns, neighborhoods, or streets. | “I lived on Georgetown Road, my house number was 1398. My box number was 614” (Olga’s interview). |
Public memory, like identity, is intrinsically linked to place. As Dicksinson, Blair, and Ott remark in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, places assume an identity just by being marked as having its own name. Dickinson et al. say, “If places are differentiated, named, ‘locales’ deployed in and deploying space, we might suggest that memories are differentiated, named ‘events’ marked for recognition from amid an undifferentiated temporal succession of occurrences. Both place and memory, from this point of view, are always already rhetorical” (24). In other words, to understand the memory of Santa Rita, we must understand what made the town different from other places, both in its time and now. From the data, it is clear that Santa Rita was both unique for distinct neighborhoods and its amenities. It makes sense why Santa Ritians are so interested in memorializing the maps of their neighborhoods—constructing dioramas and recalling the last names on their streets—and identifying with their individual communities within Santa Rita, such as Iron Hill, the New Houses, and Georgetown Road. Santa Ritians are equally interested in talking about the ways in which Santa Rita is unlike the mining towns of today.
Santa Rita was a stand-alone town defined by its amenities. Cuca aptly explains, “ I don’t think any of the other towns compared to Santa Rita. I really don’t think Central compares or Bayard comes. I don’t think any of these other towns compared to Santa Rita all because we were self-sufficient. I think we had everything, even though it was a company town and that company owned the homes and stuff.” Indeed, Santa Rita once had almost everything the community wanted: a hospital, a theater, a casino, stores, restaurants, a library, parks, schools. Once Santa Rita was destroyed, most of those amenities were never rebuilt. Today, Bayard, the biggest mining town in the area has a couple of restaurants, a park, a library and a grocery store. However, none of the mining towns have a hospital, casino, pharmacy, or bar. There are no theaters or swimming pools. Residents of the Central mining district now have to travel into Silver City for many of their basic necessities. The destruction of Santa Rita, in some ways, ended the self-sufficiency of small town life in Grant County.
Conclusion
Into Space: Film-book, tells the many stories of how Santa Ritians remain and persist as a community. It does so by presenting Santa Ritians as storytellers, weaving together narratives that capture the essence of life in this unique community rather than with detached analysis. These narratives, complete with conflict and exposition, illuminate a complex tapestry of Santa Ritians’ memories, anxieties, and their collective struggle to preserve the legacy of their town. I present these stories to the Santa Rita community, rather than dissect the data with clinical analysis, in hopes of engaging a broader public audience. Through these narratives, I aim to elevate the collaborative rhetorical practices that underpin the commemoration of Santa Rita. In doing so, I hope this project contributes to our comprehension of collective memory, moving beyond the traditional focus on material commemoration such as artifacts and memorials, though these also play a role in the films. Scholars need to grant more attention to reunions, ceremonies, and the interplay between place, geographic space, and memory. Santa Ritians’ resilience in the face of conflicts demonstrates how their memories are not passive, but active processes, especially as generational shifts in identity unfold.
As I conclude this chapter, it is important to recognize that such retellings of the stories of Santa Rita do not culminate in definitive conclusions about collective memory. Instead, I hope it creates an opportunity to ask questions about the diverse ways in which communities enact memory. How do generational shifts in identity impact the ways in which public memory is enacted? How can communities like Santa Rita adapt their commemorative practices to bridge the gaps between past and present? As audiences watch the short documentary films, I hope they get immersed in the narratives and lessons they can learn from the memory of Santa Rita, a town that, in the face of destruction, continues to preserve its memory through the power of storytelling, reunions, and entirely rebuilt neighborhoods.
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