On October 1, 1904, a train pulled into Clifton, Arizona carrying forty Irish Catholic orphans between the ages of one and six. The New York Foundling Hospital had sent them west with nuns and nurses. The local priest, Constant Mandin, had lined up placements with Catholic families in Clifton and Morenci, the twin copper towns on the Arizona side of the border. Almost every Catholic family in those towns was Mexican. The nuns did not understand what that meant here. In New York the children were Irish and poor. In Arizona they were white, and the families receiving them were not counted as white, and that was the only thing anybody in town could see. The children were washed and dressed and handed over to their new parents. Anglo women in town watched it happen and organized that night. Over the next three days, armed men went house to house and took every child back. They brought them to the hotel and redistributed them among Anglo families. The crowd came close to lynching the n...