Into Space Film-Book: Public Memory in New Mexico’s Central Mining District

Abstract

Today, Santa Rita, New Mexico, may be described as a one-mile wide, 300,000 feet deep hole in the ground, but it once thrived as a town. In 1960, Kennecott Copper Corporation, the mining company who owned the land surrounding the town, issued a removal notice for the entire population: “all houses must be cleared.” The town is now completely gone, swallowed by the expanding mine. Into Space Film-book: Public Memory in New Mexico’s Central Mining District is a digital project. While this dissertation is written as a traditional manuscript, the entire project can be found at the website https://intospacefilmbook.com/. The website hosts a series of short documentary films that combine reenactments and archival materials with oral history interviews. Using a feminist theoretical framework, the project is collaborative in nature, featuring reenactments from local volunteer actors and highlighting the firsthand accounts of people who lived in Santa Rita. As a memory studies project, Into Space: film-book illuminates complex social dynamics around memory and belonging. Findings from this study suggest collective memory manifests as participatory, pluralistic and collective rhetorical acts. For this reason, I argue multimodality and hybrid texts are perhaps the best method for documenting embodied, material, ceremonial and land-based memory practices.