The lip of an enormous copper mine pit looms behind the dusty streets of Cananea in Sonora, Mexico. Walk those streets, and you encounter outsized memorials and tributes to the mine and its workers, the kinds of markers you might find in the British Columbian communities of Kimberley, Logan's Lake, Trail, or any other mining towns that dot the rural landscape across North America.

Cananea is the largest mine in Mexico, at one time responsible for some 40 per cent of the country's copper output. At a high point on the main road leading to the mine stands what used to be a movie house. Now it is the union office and hall of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalurgicos y Similares de la Republica Mexicana (Los Mineros) mineworkers union ... more

Courtesy of The Tyee