This recounting of an obscure but significant episode in American history has much to say about the intersection of race and religion. It raises many questions, not all of which it answers.

In an early chapter, we are introduced to Margarita Chacon, a devout parishioner and a teacher of home classes in catechism and literacy. She was also very unusual in that she was an Anglo woman married to a Mexican: "But no one seemed to think of Margarita as Anglo." She's left as an anomaly, until 250 pages later an emotional letter from an Anglo woman, a lapsed Catholic, makes it clear that in Morenci a white person could not be a practicing Catholic. In that time and place, one had to choose. Margarita Chacon gave up her "whiteness" and retained her Catholicism.

Other fascinating snippets are the author's thoughts on how the orphans boarded the train in New York as "Irish" and disembarked in Arizona as "white"; how the parish priest (who was French, had no idea of the nuances of race in the Southwest, and was basically tossed under the metaphorical bus) protested that he thought the Latinos of his parish were white because they were "not Negroes"; and how it emerged that the Mexican adoptive parents had expressed, and their priest had relayed to the New York orphanage, a preference for "fair" children -- by which they probably meant "not darker than us", but the nuns interpreted to mean "blond and pale". Had 57 black-haired, olive-skinned orphans of southern Italian extraction alighted from the train, the story might have been much different.

The book spends far too long setting the scene, devoting what seemed to me a disproportionate amount of space to the history of the copper mines and early days of Clifton-Morenci. Labour relations, strikes, and union issues are also thoroughly treated, but not in such a way to make them interesting to a non-specialist. It would have been a much shorter and more interesting book if it stuck to telling the story described in the title. ( )

A historical account of the conflict that occurred when a group of Irish children from a New York orphanage arrived in an Arizona mining town and were put up for adoption.

Linda Gordon, a distinguished women’s historian, believes that historians should be true to their calling as cultural storytellers. But she is not about to give up all the analytical tools that social historians, black historians, and women’s historians have developed over the past thirty years for exploring the lives of those who did not leave us abundant written records about their own lives. In this book, Gordon interweaves her narrative with chapters which explicitly analyze the groups who play roles in it.

Read more on my blog, Me, You, and Books
http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/the-great-arizona-orphan-abduction-by-li...

I find it to bad that author didn't realy write a book about the orphan abduction. She wrote a book about race relations, which is fine and well done, but be honest with your title. ( )