Ore and Empire

Photography and the history of extraction combine as Marty Stupich's extraordinary images map the 600 year oppression of the lands and people from the Mexican Conquest to the Guggenheims, from deep inside present-day Mexico to southern Wyoming.

For centuries the Spanish Empire’s conscripted laborers extracted silver from hand-dug tunnels and shafts deep beneath the mountain spine of the Americas. By the late nineteenth century, mining engineers in the United States and in Mexico were refining not just silver ores but also lead, gold, and copper.

Copper was especially crucial to the looming industrial century. Not since the days when Spanish treasure galleons carried off the New World’s silver had anyone seen the sort of vast mineral wealth amassed by the “copper kings” of the Gilded Age. First among them was the Guggenheim family, whose American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) controlled more than 80 percent of the world’s supply of silver, copper, and lead by the early twentieth century.

Like the Spanish conquistadors before them, the ASARCO empire extended over 1,500 miles, from Central Mexico to Colorado. Its epicenter straddled the Mexico–Texas borderlands where the Rio Grande and the ancient Camino Real de Tierra Adentro converge at El Paso, the home of one of America’s largest smelters—and the centerpiece of Martin Stupich’s photographic journey. The hundred-acre ASARCO site was, until its 2013 demolition, more than a gritty industrial tract. For a century the company was central to El Paso’s vitality, even as Mexican American workers’ families in Smeltertown, the company barrio, died slowly under its toxic plume.

Ore and Empire documents this storied landscape in words and images. Original color photographs are complemented with essays by three renowned scholars, adding depth to an already sweeping historic panorama. Created over some fifteen years in the field, Stupich’s monumental work serves as an homage to the unnamed thousands who lived and toiled here.