The Home And The Hearth; Reconstructing Race and Ethnicity at the Starkville Mine and Town

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The southern coalfield in Colorado played a significant role in the growth of the American steel industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the availability of bituminous coal, which can be refined into coke, the region became a key producer of high-grade coal, with Starkville Mine emerging as a major player. The mine and its associated town were instrumental in shaping the social and cultural fabric of the coal-mining industry in the American West, thanks to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company's (CF&I) Sociological Department. This department implemented various programs to promote unity and downplay racial and ethnic differences while bringing in a diverse and cheap workforce. However, despite the efforts to standardize their way of living, the people of Starkville demonstrated remarkable agency, asserting their own decisions and influencing their own lives, as best illustrated continued of traditional Mexicano practices in the home and the hearth. This paper explores the complex interplay between dominant forces and individual agency in the coal-mining industry of the American West

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38403.0