Coal Veins

Thomas Walsh, the author’s great-grandfather, was killed in a mine accident in northeastern Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy of Liam Farrell)

Walsh, my great-grandfather, would share their fate on that cold spring day.

I’ve often thought about how it was not only a familial tragedy but also a moment when our family tree might have been cut off at the roots. It inspired my academic studies on the double-edged promise of immigration, as well as the need to resist the chauvinistic temptation to wield it as evidence that “we” had it harder than anyone who followed, or somehow have a more legitimate claim to this country.

Those same concerns animate the work of Paul Shackel, a professor in the UMD Department of Anthropology who has spent years exploring the history, culture and modern-day transformation of Luzerne County and its second-largest city, Hazleton. While Shackel’s work there initially centered on century-old events, he was also pulled in by the transformation of an area once dominated by deindustrialization and population decline into a critical goods-distribution network dependent on an exponentially increasing Latino population. He confronted age-old American questions: Who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s working hard and who isn’t, who’s making a place better and who’s dragging it down.

In a fresh project collecting oral histories of newer Hazleton arrivals for a state operated museum, Shackel hopes to show the historical, cultural and socioeconomic connections spanning ethnic groups and hundreds of years of history.

“We all have commonalities,” he says.

Children of miners play near their homes in Hazleton, Pa., while surrounded by coal debris. Generations of European immigrants cycled into the industry before it collapsed in the mid-20th century. (Photo by Keystone View Company, via Library of Congress)

While working after graduate school for the National Park Service in Harper’s Ferry, he attended a conference in Hazleton about the 100th anniversary of the Lattimer Massacre. In what Shackel has called “one of the most troubling, yet forgotten, moments in U.S. history,” deputies fired on striking Polish, Slovak and Lithuanian coal miners on Sept. 10, 1897, killing 19 and wounding 38. Intrigued by the relative obscurity of the event and derivations of his grandmother’s last name in local cemeteries—residents also “looked like my relatives,” he says—he returned a decade later. Along with a graduate student and volunteers, he found the site of the massacre and some evidence left behind, including four bullets and a miner’s tin cup with holes from a shotgun blast.

It had taken until Sept. 10, 1972, for a memorial to be dedicated to the Lattimer victims. Coal operators, Shackel says, had little interest in promoting anything that could rally labor. Surviving protestors found themselves blacklisted, and a jury acquitted the sheriff and his deputies after only a half hour of deliberations; the miners, according to the defense attorney, were living up to their peoples’ histories of “mischief and destruction.”

He also discovered that at the memorial dedication ceremony, the famed Mexican American labor and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez asked the audience to see the connections between the struggles of the European miners and those of Latino migrant farmers.

“They too are immigrants. They too have strange sounding names. They too speak a foreign language,” Chavez said. “We know only too well of the hardship and sacrifice of these mine workers because together there is another group of workers who have things in common.”

Anthropology Professor Paul Shackel, right, speaks with Victor Perez following an interview for the oral history project. Perez is president of the Dominican House of Hazleton, a social services agency in the city’s downtown. (Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle)

“We were in need of opportunities,” she says. “Life was getting expensive.”

Renting a five-bedroom house in the Pennsylvania city cost only $350 a month at the time, she remembers. Jobs were available at warehouses and distribution centers for companies such as Office Depot, Amazon, American Eagle, Bimbo bakeries and Coca-Cola, sparking a reversal of my grandparents’ internal American journey: First-, second- and-third generation immigrants in New York and New Jersey flocked anew to the anthracite region. In 2006, about 30% of Hazleton’s 31,000 residents identified as Latino; about a decade later, it was nearly half.

Mendez, who was interviewed for the oral history project, had good English language skills and helped new arrivals set up utilities and navigate government processes. She remembers snide comments in grocery stores and shouts from passing cars to go back to her “own country.”

The city infamously passed an ordinance in 2006 to deny business permits to employers who hired illegal immigrants and to fine landlords renting to them. It also made English the official language, prohibiting government documents from being translated into Spanish without the city’s approval.

Francisco Torres-Aranda, a local businessman who now represents the Hazleton area on the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, says the language requirement was “where it went too far.”

“The majority of the people in Hazleton weren’t here illegally,” Torres-Aranda says. “It became obvious what the motivation was. The motivation was to create animosity.”

While a U.S. Court of Appeals ultimately overturned that law in 2010, Hazleton fell under a microscope again when reporters and writers fanned across the country to find an explanation for President Donald Trump’s unexpected election. Luzerne County had voted for President Barack Obama by eight points in 2008 and five in 2012, but it swung decisively to Trump by 20 points in 2016. (President Joe Biden, who was born in Scranton, was bested in 2020 by about 14 points.) One resulting book was Ben Bradlee Jr.’s “The Forgotten,” which catalogued how frustrated working-class nostalgia, local political corruption and pure racism combined to support reactionary immigration rhetoric and policy.

“When all that’s settled, then we can think about helping others,” one resident told Bradlee. “I mean, people in this country need help too, don’t they?”

Today, a large banner hangs from a house not far from the Lattimer Massacre memorial: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Trump.”

Signs in downtown Hazleton for businesses and community events show the blend of immigrants. (Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle)

“It definitely helped with the gap between the populations,” he says. “(History) can be used to better understand each other.”

The new oral history effort underway with Scranton’s Anthracite Heritage Museum continues in that direction. While today the brick-and-mortar museum has information on European immigration and artifacts like mule carts and a child laborer’s beat-up hobnail boots, it plans to add a digital collection of interviews with Latino immigrants by the end of the year. The changing nature of the anthracite region is not just an opportunity to engage with a new population, says Bode Morin, site administrator of the museum and Eckley Miners’ Village, but also to show how it has continually developed and evolved.

“We are not a bunch of individual groups,” he says. “We are one culture.”

Gina Romancheck personally knows the value of such work. Shackel’s excavation of her great-aunts’ home brought her family’s everyday experience back to life, from seeds to grow their own vegetables to stockings that could be knotted into rugs. The new project could do the same for younger Latino immigrants, she says, as well as show older white residents how alike they are.

“It gives you a sense of where you come from,” she says. “You think you are different in a certain way, but you’re really not.”

Amilcar Arroyo (Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle)

Listening to Arroyo proudly show pictures of his young grandson, I’m of course reminded of my own grandmother. While my grandfather died 12 days after I turned 3, “Flossie,” as relatives and friends called her, was a warm and loving presence in my life until she died in 2003. She traveled with us on vacations and came along when I first moved to college, yet I never heard a word about her father’s death or saw any outward trace of what would have been justified sadness, bitterness or anger; the only remonstrance I ever remember getting from her was gentle chiding after I grumbled about heading back to middle school at the end of one summer. “Things have a way of changing,” she would say to complaints and difficulties.

One day, I drove north to look for the mine where Walsh was killed, with the help of a 1926 map provided by the Luzerne County Historical Society. The closest I could get among thick brush, trees and signs warning against trespassing was a rusty gate in front of a seemingly abandoned construction site. But there were also plenty of modest and pleasant houses with children’s toys in the yards. Across from where the entrance would have been in 1911, the parking lots of a glass manufacturer and a wheelchair and disability product supplier were full.

Things, indeed, have a way of changing. TERP