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. ( )

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction by Linda Gordon is one of a sizable group of micro-histories that have relatively recently begun to examine history through small events such as criminal cases, seeking to gain a greater knowledge of society and other issues through the examination of those events. Linda Gordon attempts to do the same thing, this time by examining what has come to be known as 'the great Arizona orphan abduction' when several dozen orphans given to Mexican foster parents were removed by the citizens of the mining towns of Clifton and Morenci – ostensibly to protect them from the bad parenting and conditions within those Mexican households. However, rather than just giving a dry account of this, Gordon enlarges her view to show the orphan abductions are merely the tail end of a process of racism between Anglos and Mexicans which had been ongoing for several decades. Moreover, Gordon also sees the episode as a means for women in the town to assert some of their power in a sphere not traditionally dominated by their male counterparts.

Gordon divides her book into two parts – which in my mind was particularly unhelpful – in which she discusses the history of the region, such as its 1903 mineworkers strike, and the place of women in late colonial Arizona – both from the Mexican and American perspectives. Interspaced throughout are smaller chapters on the orphan abduction itself, frequently discussing only a single day at a time. Together the two parts of the book do weave a relatively good story, but as an explanatory model it leaves much to be desired and in my opinion the story could have been better told had the story itself not been split up amongst larger social history chapters when instead a larger chronologically binded narrative could have been done better following all of the social history chapters together. Throughout the author also gives some small vignettes on the principal players such as the most important Anglos in Clifton, the nuns, and others but throughout perhaps the most important actors – the Mexicans and orphans are silent, perhaps for good documentary reasons, but it is still a somewhat glaring hole in the story which the author makes a point to acknowledge several times throughout the book.

Despite these problems Gordon does do a good enough job examining the events and granting them a deeper social or gendered meaning. Her larger chapters on events such as the 1903 miners strike , do give a good understanding of the reasons why events unfolded as they did, along with explaining to us the life in the mines and other issues.

Together then Gordon does give us a relatively good social history on the great Arizona orphan abduction. Despite its flaws, it does manage to examine the event and give it deeper social and gendered connotations that are not readily available at a first glance. ( )