Fernando Serrano learns about Bisbee’s dark history while playing a striking miner.
The people who made Bisbee ’17 had good reason to shave the first two digits off the date. It was shot in 2017, but it’s also about a horrific event that happened in 1917 and how it affects the residents of Bisbee, Arizona, a full century later.
Over barren purple and orange-tinted landscapes and repeated choruses of “Solidarity Forever,” Bisbee ’17 is spooky and, at times, pretentious. It’s a documentary, but also a reenactment, an art piece, an anthropological study, and a work of restorative justice. Yet the result is emotionally riveting.
What happened in Bisbee on July 12, 1917, began with a strike by copper workers, led by members of the Industrial Workers of the World (aka the Wobblies). Organizers arrived with a vision of anti-capitalist internationalism and fired up the largely immigrant workforce.
The mining companies, which ruled the town and were run by Anglos, played hard ball. The sheriff deputized a bunch of locals, almost all white, who rousted 1,200 strikers and sympathizers from their homes in the early hours, marched them four miles to a ball park, herded them onto cattle cars and left them in the middle of the New Mexican desert to die.
This horror was, for the most part, swept under the carpet. People who spent their entire lives in Bisbee seemed to barely register that their relatives had been a part of what came to be known as “The Bisbee Deportation.” “This town could keep a secret like nobody else,” says one resident.
One particularly compelling storyline is that of Fernando Serrano, a Mexican immigrant who learns about Bisbee’s history by playing a striking miner in the 2017 reenactment. In real life, his mother was deported back to Mexico from Bisbee and imprisoned for 11 years. “They got what they needed from the immigrants,” says Serrano. “They built what they needed them to build and they said ‘we don’t need you anymore.’”
Director Robert Greene approaches all of his subjects, both deportees and “removers,” with compassion. He’s making the point that even well-meaning people can participate in monstrous deeds. The descendants of the deputies describe why they thought the strikers threatened the war effort and the fabric of the town. “If something wasn’t done, there was going to be blood on the streets,” says one man. When it came to choosing sides, things got messy, and stayed that way for generations. The film shows a family whose grandfather rounded up and sent his own brother off to die in the desert.
The acting in the reenactment scenes is not always top notch; these are townspeople, often playing versions of their own relatives. The long cattle car sequence at the end lacks the drive of real documentary footage, and artsy shots of the ball field are not what we need — today — when immigrant children are being separated from parents and housed in camps in Texas.
Bisbee ’17 screens at 7 p.m. on Oct. 24 at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the museum’s Spotlight Cinema Series. A post-screening Q&A features Katherine Benton-Cohen, a history professor at Georgetown University who holds a doctorate in history from UW-Madison. She served as the film’s historical advisor.
Bisbee is important because of the way it explores the human propensity for violence and acting out of fear of the “other.” At its core, it embodies a hope that revisiting the past can inform how we behave now.
