12.

Douglas, AZ

31°20'54.2"N 109°34'53.2"W

Mobile Surveillance Capability (MSC)

This is a Mobile Surveillance Capability (MSC)—sometimes also referred to as Mobile Video Surveillance System (MVSS)—vehicle, positioned atop a massive pile of smelting slag on the outskirts of Douglas, Arizona in Cochise County.

Together, the surveillance vehicle and piles of slag—a by-product of the mining industry—form part of an infrastructure of conquest and control that has been under construction in Cochise County for more than 150 years, an infrastructure that has shaped this landscape into one of extraction, displacement, and expropriation.

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The heaps of slag, and the land underneath them, are owned by the Phelps Dodge Company (now owned by Freeport-McMoRan), which began its life in 1834 as an import/export company shipping cotton harvested by slaves in the U.S. Deep South to Liverpool, England, before expanding to mining operations in the Arizona Territory in the 1880s.

In 1917, after a similar operation on a smaller scale in Jerome, the company conspired with the Cochise County Sheriff Harry C. Wheeler to illegally kidnap and deport more than 1,100 striking mineworkers and other residents of Bisbee, Arizona, forcing them into cattle cars and leaving them more than 100 miles away in the New Mexico desert near Hermanas in an incident often referred to today as the Bisbee Deportation.

Racial anxieties were a major motivator for the Bisbee Deportation. Locals at the time often referred to their mining town as a “white man’s camp”, and many whites saw Mexicans, Slavs, Chinese, and other perceived racial outsiders as threats to the nation—especially when they organized through labor unions. In fact, about 90 percent of those deported from Bisbee in 1917 were born outside the United States.

In both Jerome and Bisbee, as throughout the borderlands region today, the boundaries of citizenship, race, and belonging were policed by both state and private violence. Decades before the deportations of Jerome and Bisbee, a genocidal campaign to erase native Apache populations from this region saw, at its height, almost a fifth of the entire U.S. Army engaged in the project. And the 1917 deportations instigated by Phelps Dodge were accomplished with the assistance not only of local sheriffs but also through the recruitment and, in the case of Bisbee, deputization, of armed vigilantes.

This assemblage of state and private violence continues to police the borders of belonging in Cochise County and elsewhere throughout the US-Mexico borderlands today. MSC/MVSS vehicles like this one are often operated by National Guard or other military personnel. The current Cochise County Sheriff, Mark Dannels, has built a national reputation within the media networks of the far right as a vocal proponent of using state power at all scales for aggressive border enforcement, echoing his predecessor a century ago who also publicly criticized the US president—Woodrow Wilson, at that time—for not doing enough to fortify the southern border. And like the vigilante groups that helped to carry out the Bisbee Deportation, recruited and legitimized by Phelps Dodge and their police partners, border vigilante groups and private security contractors continue to operate in Cochise County and elsewhere along the border with Mexico.