Linda Gordon is Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of the now classic history of
birth control in America, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, and of Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History
of Family Violence, winner of the Joan Kelly Prize for the best book in women's history.
Summary
Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy from Columbia University
One of two Finalists in the Willa Cather Literary Awards sponsored by Women Writing the West.
Winner of the American Historical Association's 2000 Albert J. Beveridge Award.
In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic
families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town's Anglos, furious
at this "interracial" transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly
lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including
the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes.
The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction tells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation of racial
boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a "wild West" boomtown, where the
mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became
big business and whiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced
passions that erupted in the "orphan incident." To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child
with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue.
Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their
church and asserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to "save" the orphans, and
they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda
Gordon brilliantly recreates and dissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story
that resonates with today's conflicts over the "best interests of the child."
