In the weeks to follow I will begin listing various publications that I consider useful into understanding the madness that is taking place in the domestic forest. Click on the image to visit the publisher.

  LINDA GORDON

  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."

  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.