"Fitted for Work in this Locality": Whiteness and Labor at Apex, Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Depression-era company town and logging community of Apex, Arizona was staffed and occupied almost exclusively by White lumberjacks of Scandinavian descent. Archival research indicates that the community’s racial and ethnic makeup was by design, given the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company’s staunch refusal to hire African Americans and tendency to hire Indigenous and Hispanic workers in non-logging positions. Furthermore, the mythic image of “the Lumberjack” is invariably situated in aesthetics that invoke an idealized White American masculinity, creating an image where race, gender, and labor narratives intersect. This paper seeks to critically examine how the Scandinavian laborers at Apex “learned” American Whiteness in an environment where race and employment were so tightly linked, and how this racial identity may have interfaced with their home countries’ ideas about masculinity and work.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow