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A dirt road passes the old Harshaw cemetery and climbs a four-lane drive to the hilltop where South32’s mining operation is located. Today, half a mile from the Soto homestead, a third wave of mining is gaining speed. “ Harshaw at that time was booming, and word got around,” said Frank Soto, the oldest sibling. “I have a theory of why my grandfather had the vision to get a homestead when other Chicanos didn’t,” said Juan Soto.“It was the memory of dispossession.” Only 8 miles away, in the town of Patagonia, the P a cific Railroad connected the local mines to the rest of the West. During the gold rush years, t he couple headed eastward, jumping from mining camp to mining camp until they finally reached Harshaw - then a town bustling with 2,000 people, 30 saloons, several breweries and shops, a church, a school and a post office. The Sotos believe this is what pushed Angel and Josefa, their great-grandparents, to leave California in the 1870s. failed to honor the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and took their property rights away. However, after the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, they suddenly found themselves foreigners in their own land, when the U.S. They came from Mexico in 1775, with the Spanish expeditions that founded San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Sotos have been in the West for nine generations, since before it became part of the United States. “ We still call it El Durazno (the peach).” “ Harshaw was named after the guy (who) founded the mines, but it already had a name: El Durazno,” says Henry Soto. “ We were poor, but we had everything,” said Angelita. The Soto kids grew up running around barefoot, without tap water or electricity. The siblings laughed and reminisc ed about their childhoods: the pranks they played on each other, their backyard with its bounty of black walnuts, acorns, watercress and fruit trees. Angelita Soto, the fourth of the siblings, joined in by phone as the conversation flew back and forth in English and Spanish. On a recent spring day, they sat around their family dining table on the south side of Tucson, 70 miles north of Harshaw. įRANK, HENRY, MIKE AND JUAN SOTO grew up in Harshaw in the 1940s and ’50s with their parents and three sisters. But whether modern mining - with its much greater profits and the promise of better environmental safeguards - will leave a better legacy this time around remains to be seen. It is currently doing exploratory drilling half a mile away from the ghost town, acquiring permits and gearing up to operate in the near future. Now, more than half a century later, mining is coming back to Harshaw : South32, an Australia-based polymetallic mining company, estimates that there are still at least 155 million tons of high -grade metals hidden deep underground. But in 1925, and again in the 1950s, the combination of collapsing metal prices and exhausted mineral veins sent the mining companies looking elsewhere, leaving tons of untreated mineral waste behind and no future for the workers who ’ d powered the industry. For nearly a century, the y drilled and transported ore through tunnels for $2 a day - half of what their Anglo counterparts earned. With the mines came thousands of workers and their families, most of them Mexican Americans and Latinos. Within three decades, the Patagonia Mountains had produced 79% of all the ore processed in the territory, with a total value exceeding $346 million yearly in today’s currency. A patchwork of mining claims soon covered the region, with 40 operations in Harshaw alone. government passed the General Mining Act in 1872, giving prospectors the right to claim mineral deposits on public land for no more than $5 per acre, investors poured in.
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It held some of the Arizona Territory’s highest-grade silver, lead and gold ore, so when the U.S. Now a ghost town, Harshaw was one of nine mining camps in the area that saw waves of prospectors come and go in the 19th century. A crumbling wooden building, relic of a mining supervisor's home, and a cemetery are all that remain of what once was one of the West’s richest mining towns. Where houses once stood, flat barren earth stretches to the base of nearby low oak-covered hills. Centuries-old sycamore trees tower over the dry riverbed of Harshaw Creek, in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona.