Extinct lands, temporal geographies: Chicana literature and the urgency of space

Abstract

In need of a new depot for the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, Phelps Dodge Copper Company executives sat down in 1912 to plan a grand new building.They had more than enough money-more than $75,000 in cash reserves available for a project they hoped would signal the increasing importance of their company town, Douglas.Located on the U.S.-Mexico border, more than two hundred miles from the capital of the Territory of Arizona, Douglas had been in existence for fewer than a dozen years as the site for Phelps Dodge's copper-smelting operation but was already significant to the copper company's transnational empire.The building itself would symbolize the company's reach across both sides of the line.As they began to imagine a new railroad depot, Phelps Dodge executives debated what architectural style might fit their vision for the city and company.Mission revival, a typical choice for train depots, was rejected because it seemed too regional, not serious enough.They turned instead to the neoclassical beaux arts style, popularized not long before in the United States at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; executives apparently relished the style because it more effectively symbolized a ''sense of strength'' and connected the little town to what they saw as the ''prevailing national imagery.'' 1 Given the depot's context-its construction occurred during the Mexican Revolution when the entire frontera, including Douglas, was engulfed in the battle over democracy, land reform, and the role of U.S. corporate capital in Mexico-it is hardly surprising that the copper company avoided the mission revival style, a style that might have invoked a nostalgia for Mexico's own claims to the region.Having decided that beaux arts, with its monumental scale, its references to Renaissance architecture, and its stark formality made the appropriate statement, Phelps Dodge lavished money on the building by including such details as a Tiffany glass cupola.