Early on the morning of October 17, 1950, zinc miners finished the graveyard shift at the Empire Zinc Company in the village of Hanover, New Mexico. They climbed out of the mine shaft and into the sunlight illuminating the mountains in this southwestern corner of the state. Other workers gathered outside the company’s property—not to begin the day shift, however, but to begin a strike. Contract negotiations between their union, Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill), and Empire Zinc had finally broken down around midnight, with the company rejecting union demands for collar-to-collar pay, paid holidays, wages matching the district’s standards, and a reduction in the number of job classifications.1 This last demand was aimed at combating the dual-wage system in which Mexican American workers routinely earned less than Anglo workers, for a large number of classifications made it easier for employers to keep Mexican American miners in low-paying jobs. Striking to press their claims, 140 men picketed two entrances to the Empire Zinc property. Their picket lines completely shut down the mine.2
A year later, the picket lines were still in place, still blocking the mine entrances, and Empire Zinc was barely operating. But if the picket lines continued to perform the same function, they had nonetheless been completely transformed: the marching picketers were all women and children, not the men who walked out on that October morning in 1950. This dramatic change had taken place in June 1951. The strike began as a typical conflict between miners and their employer over work conditions and wages, but like many labor conflicts, especially in single-industry towns like Hanover, the strikers depended on a wider community, especially their wives, for support. And when the Empire Zinc Company got a court injunction prohibiting striking miners from picketing, miners’ wives took over the picket lines. This role reversal sparked conflict between husbands and wives. Although husbands knew that they could no longer picket, they resented their wives’ strike activity, which came at the expense of housework; even worse, women expected their husbands to do the housework. Women were frustrated, too, because their husbands refused to help at home and, more fundamentally, because men frequently forbade their wives to picket; some women came to resent that they were expected to have their husbands’ permission in the first place. The strike’s success in January 1952 rested on women strikers’ individual and collective bravery in the face of violence directed against the picketers, and on the ways that women and men negotiated the power relations in the family. Ultimately, union families redefined their community’s goals to include equality between men and women.
Yet another year later, in early 1953, women were still marching in circles on a picket line, but they were doing so on a movie set, on a ranch not far from the Empire Zinc mine. Blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers had joined the mining families to make a feature film that would tell the story of the strike, focusing on the conflict between husbands and wives. The Mine-Mill workers and their families played most of the roles and helped craft the screenplay. The product of this extraordinary collaboration, Salt of the Earth (1954), represented a spirited—though ultimately limited—resistance to domestic anticommunism, for both groups had ties to the Left and had suffered repression because of those ties. Many of Mine-Mill’s national leaders and a few of Local 890’s leaders belonged at one point or another to the Communist Party (CP), as did the blacklisted Hollywood artists who helped produce Salt. Making the film was their attempt to break through the isolation imposed by anticommunism. Re-enacting the strike through an artistic medium was also a way for the mining families to make sense of the changes caused by the strike. But union opponents and Hollywood anticommunists drew upon the political power of anticommunism to try, through violence and intimidation, to prevent the film’s completion.
For the miners, the Empire Zinc strike represented the culmination of a decade of union organizing around both workplace equality and civil rights for Mexican Americans. This upswing of Mexican American labor activism coincided with the downward turn in the fortunes of left-wing unions in the United States, and the juxtaposition of these two trends marks an important part of the history both of Mexican Americans and of the American Left. Because Mine-Mill worked for Mexican American labor and civil rights, Mexican American union members were to a great degree inoculated against the raging anticommunism that shaped the political culture and weakened the labor movement elsewhere. From a very different background came the Hollywood filmmakers. Already blacklisted from the movie industry for refusing to disavow communism, these filmmakers conceived of Salt of the Earth as an assault against the blacklist and the forces that gave rise to it. Independent movies that told “real stories about real working people” would not only break with conventional Hollywood storytelling but also show other filmmakers how to break out of the constraints of Hollywood studio contracts. The success in producing the film—and the failure in distributing it—show that leftists and working-class activists had some space to mark out an alternative to the emerging Cold War consensus, but not enough to give that alternative the power it would need to reshape the political and cultural terrain.
When the miners struck the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico, in October 1950, they believed that Empire Zinc was colluding with other mining companies in an ambitious effort to destroy the union. The strike, then, quickly became not just a test of Mine-Mill Local 890’s strength but also a conflict in which the union’s recent achievements in advancing Mexican American civil, as well as labor, rights were at stake. In meeting this high-stakes test, strikers drew on a heightened ethnic and class consciousness that they had developed over the 1940s.
Miners picketed uneventfully until June 1951, when Empire Zinc got a court injunction that forced the miners and their union to devise new strategies if they were to maintain the strike. Chief among these strategies was one proposed by miners’ wives: women would replace men on the picket lines, thereby obeying the letter of the injunction against picketing miners while defeating its purpose. In an unprecedented move, women took over the picket lines on June 12, 1951. And they held the lines for more than six months, until the Empire Zinc Company agreed to negotiate in January 1952. Miners won wage increases, other benefits, and improved housing conditions, and they considered the strike a victory.
But the strike proved important for more than labor-management relations and the survival of the union: women’s picket activity threw gender relations into confusion. On the picket lines women met violence from strikebreakers and law enforcement, while at home they encountered ambivalence—and sometimes outright hostility—from their own husbands. Pushed to the sidelines, many miners resented women’s picket activity because it threw into question their own work, their leadership, and thus, to a large degree, their manhood. Leaving the physical defense of the picket to women was bad enough. But actually taking over women’s household work, which the women could not perform while picketing, was even more emasculating. Yet that was precisely what their wives demanded. Women used the temporary inversion of the sexual division of labor to assert their independence as political actors and to challenge men’s authority in the household. Organizing shifts on the picket line, enduring jail time, holding the line against physical assault—all of these activities convinced many women that they wielded considerable power as a group and that they deserved their husbands’ respect as equals. Thus, the victory of the strike consisted also of forcing the union to take serious account of women’s place in the class struggle, for it revealed that women existed not at the margins of a struggle waged by men but as fully integral members of the working class.
The Empire Zinc strike reverberated beyond the mining district in which it took place, helping to dismantle the dual-wage system of the American Southwest. But it would probably not have registered as more than a blip on the radar screen of American history had it not also found expression in Salt of the Earth. Blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers, enchanted by the story of the women’s picket, enlisted the mining families in an alliance to translate strike experiences into a dramatic film that could open cinema to realistic portrayals of working-class life. Mining families brought to the project more than their stories; they also collaborated on drafting the script, played most of the dramatic roles, and organized much of the off-camera production. The film, unique among movies of the period, connected women’s domestic labor with men’s “productive” labor in a way that presaged later feminist analyses of class and gender. The film’s production in Grant County represented an effort of unionists and blacklisted artists and technicians to render the blacklist impotent. For that very reason, it drew national attention from anticommunists, who were outraged that the blacklisted were still making films, and violent opposition from those Grant County residents who had opposed the union during the strike. Violence marked the production just as it had marked the strike itself, and the film only barely reached completion. This remarkable victory, however, was diminished since a coalition of anticommunists in the film industry, the American Legion, and even some trade unions prevented the film’s distribution.3 Feeding off the publicity generated by the movie, the federal government targeted Local 890 representative Clinton Jencks and others in Mine-Mill for criminal prosecutions that lingered in the courts for years. Salt of the Earth reached audiences only after the blacklist began to disappear in the 1960s. Today, half a century after it was made, Salt of the Earth is regularly cited as among the most important American films of the twentieth century.
Salt of the Earth tells the story of a fictional Mexican American couple, Ramón and Esperanza Quintero, who live and work in Zinctown, a small New Mexican mining town.4 Ramón works for the Delaware Zinc Company and Esperanza works in the home. We quickly learn that there is tension between them, based on the different ways that they experience working-class life. Ramón enjoys meeting his friends in the beer hall, which Esperanza resents; Esperanza enjoys the radio, which represents to Ramón a degrading dependence on the installment plan by which they are paying for it. Esperanza, pregnant with their third child, heightens the differences between their worlds by comparing Ramón’s imminent strike with her imminent motherhood: “You have your strike,” she tells him. “I’ll have my baby.” Yet in contrasting their worlds, Esperanza also establishes the parity of obligations held by husbands and wives.
Their relationship registers the changes wrought by the strike. Ramón enthusiastically supports the strike as an expression of his own manhood and status as a breadwinner. The strike chokes off his paycheck (which distresses Esperanza, who must feed the family every day), but he adopts a longer view, in which life without the union would set them back even further. He recognizes, more readily than Esperanza does, that the union deserves credit for protecting Mexican American workers against Anglo discrimination, and this strike promises to win them equality with Anglo miners. But when women offer to take over the picket lines in order to circumvent “that rotten Taft-Hartley injunction,” Ramón opposes their proposal because he does not want to “hide behind women’s skirts.” Already angry that Esperanza votes against him in the union meeting at which the ladies’ auxiliary gets assigned to picket duty, he becomes even more distressed by the changes he soon finds in his home. With Esperanza away, he is suddenly forced to feed the children, wash the dishes, and hang the laundry, and he defends, ever more shrilly, his manly prerogatives in the home. For her part, Esperanza gradually transforms herself from a timid housewife into a vibrant labor activist, and she begins to stand up to her husband.
The conflict between Ramón and Esperanza mirrors the final confrontation between the mining community and the company. Convinced that the company will win out—partly because he overhears company discussions, partly because he cannot accept that women might win the strike—Ramón tells Esperanza that they cannot go on this way. He starts cleaning his rifle, set on joining his equally disgruntled friends on a hunting trip that would take them away from their assignment to the “standby squad.” By going hunting, the men would reassert their manhood by engaging in a quintessentially masculine activity and by defying a strike leadership that, they felt, had cast them aside. Esperanza believes that the hunt jeopardizes the strike: she senses that the company is on the verge of “something big,” and if the men were to leave, the company might pull it off. But Ramón has lost patience with the strategy of the women’s picket, and he seems willing to abandon it even if doing so means losing the strike. Esperanza, though, wants to win. Even more, she wants “to rise ... and push everything up” as she goes. “And if you can’t understand this,” she tells Ramón, “you’re a fool—because you can’t win this strike without me! You can’t win anything without me!” Ramón gets angry and grabs her shoulder, prepared to hit her: in this moment we see a history of male authority, enforced by the fist, met by Esperanza’s refusal to submit. “That would be the old way,” she tells him icily. “Never try it on me again.”
Ramón goes hunting with his friends. As Esperanza’s neighbor Teresa Vidal comments, “So they had a little taste of what it’s like to be a woman . . . and they run away.” But Ramón has a change of heart while walking in the woods, and he rallies his friends to return to town. And it is just in time, for the sheriff is at that moment evicting the Quinteros from their company-owned house. As union supporters pour in from all directions, Ramón finally recognizes the power of working-class solidarity, in which both men and women are indispensable. He and Esperanza quietly arrange for women to start bringing the furniture back into the house through another door, confounding the sheriff and his deputies. The community has a dramatic, tense showdown with the sheriff, and the sheriff backs down. The company representatives, watching from a safe distance, agree to settle the strike. Ramón’s long view of class solidarity has been refashioned to accommodate a closer view of the household and its critical place in the community.
The strike, the social history of the mining region in which it took place, and the film’s production and script have important things to tell us about the Mexican American working class, the Left, and gender in the twentieth century. The left-wing Mine-Mill union offered considerable space for working-class Mexican Americans to challenge ethnic and class inequality, first at work, then in local society and politics, and finally (along with left-wing Hollywood artists) in popular culture. Mine-Mill first appeared in Grant County early in the 1930s, a militant union increasingly close to the Communist Party and, as such, committed to interracial and interethnic organizing. Its efforts were part of widespread and heavily repressed Mexican American labor organizing in the Southwest and Midwest during the Depression, primarily by Communist-influenced labor unions.5 Mine-Mill stepped up its activity in Grant County in 1941, part of a southwestern organizing drive as the American economy geared up for World War II.6 Armed with an antiracist policy, Mine-Mill used the wartime labor shortage, the federal government’s official commitment to equality in defense-industry jobs, and the union’s patriotic no-strike pledge to organize Mexican American workers. If elsewhere, as other historians have shown, left-led unions scaled back their antiracist work in the name of all-out war production, in Grant County the two went hand in hand.7 Over the course of the 1940s, these workers and organizers collectively began to chip away at, if not eliminate, the dual-wage system in the southwestern mines. After World War II, Mine-Mill members and leaders also expanded the union’s mission to include addressing political and social inequality in the mining towns of Grant County.
The story of Local 890, however, was not solely a linear progression from oppression to liberation, or even overlapping and ever-widening spheres of union activity. Local 890’s strength was tempered after World War II by the domestic Cold War, when mining managers, eager to reassert their power, confidently wielded the club of anticommunism in labor disputes. Mine-Mill was one of eleven unions expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1949 and 1950 for inadequately ridding themselves of communist influence. But in order to understand the local political economy, it is important to reject any easy or apparent symmetry between communism and anticommunism; both were present in Grant County in the late 1940s, but they do not line up evenly in opposing columns. Instead, we find a confusing political terrain in which one version of communism—an especially democratic one—influenced Local 890’s structure and actions but could not be openly acknowledged, while anticommunism was used by management as one tool among many in what was essentially an economic contest. Some Local 890 members and leaders belonged to the CP, finding in it a powerful tool for pressing working-class and Mexican American claims. Significantly, the party organized married couples, thus building into its very structure a recognition of women’s importance to the class struggle. But despite these complexities, in the discourse of anticommunism, communists were single-minded, uniform, implacable, and devious, insinuating themselves into legitimate institutions and committing unsuspecting members to a program that subverted American democracy. Communist unions were controlled by Soviet agents and served Soviet masters. There was no room in this picture for a left-wing union to be democratic or genuinely to represent the interests of its members. Ironically, the searchlights that regularly swept the nation in the late 1940s and 1950s in order to expose communism failed to throw light on the real meaning of leftist democratic unionism precisely because they forced all progressives to hide any connections to the CP.
Anticommunists were correct, however, in perceiving a threat to the social order: Mexican American miners were threatening to step out of their proper place. In this respect, the miners were part of a wider tradition of Mexican American labor and civil rights activism whose groundwork was laid in the 1930s by left-wing unions and by civil rights organizations like the radical Congreso Nacional del Pueblo de Habla Española (National Congress of Spanish-Speaking People) and the moderate League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).8 World War II catalyzed this activism, as returning Mexican American veterans demanded the civil rights that should have accompanied their military service on behalf of democracy.9 But by casting that threat to the social order as a monolithic communism that poorly matched union men’s union experiences, anticommunists created a disjuncture that convinced unionists that employers had a more sinister agenda. Whether or not they believed or cared that there were communists among them, Local 890’s members saw through and were quick and determined to expose management’s anticommunism as a cynical pretext to push Mexican American workers back “in their place.”10
Gender shaped all of these developments, and this book also considers how sexual divisions of labor and attendant ideologies influenced people’s experience of class. People are often invested in the work they perform in ways that go beyond the wages they take home. Men develop and reinforce a sense of their manliness through the work they perform, and they frequently act to protect their prerogatives as men even if those actions also threaten what we might consider their “class” interests.11 Similarly, women frequently defend their prerogatives as caregivers.12 Sexual divisions of labor, which take place both in the labor market and in families, shape and are reinforced by ideology. In the United States of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, class formation took place in gendered ways, captured most succinctly in the ideology of the “family wage,” whereby men expected to earn a wage adequate to support a family (although the ideology itself masked the degree to which families depended on much more than a breadwinner’s wage). Women’s productive labor—that which could command a wage and produce a commodity—never followed the blind dictates of capital alone. In deciding whether women would work for wages, families took a variety of concerns into account rather than always seeking the highest income.13 A family’s decision, moreover, was often the outcome of conflict and negotiation among members with different interests. Women’s unpaid labor was also intimately connected to industrialization, because women’s housework materially compensated for men’s low wages; moreover, the very invisibility of women’s contributions as “work” reinforced the ideology of a male breadwinner being the only worker in the family.14 Quite apart from industrial capitalism, in fact, women’s work in the household has been fundamental to social reproduction, the daily work required to raise children and sustain families. These connections between work and family, between paid and unpaid labor, have been especially important in twentieth-century Chicana history.15
Mining towns (and other towns dominated by a single industry) are fascinating places for studying the workings of class, gender, and ethnicity. Mining towns often had skewed sex ratios, especially in the early years, but over time—particularly in the twentieth century—employers found that their workforce would be more stable if men were married. In these contexts, male workers reinforced a masculinity based both on the hard physical labor and courage required of miners and on the breadwinner ethic, affirming their responsibility for earning a wage that could support their families.16 For their part, women in mining towns found limited job opportunities; they were especially dependent upon marriage at the same time that their unpaid work was especially crucial to the reproduction of the workforce. Because of the power wielded by companies in single-industry towns, labor conflict often affected the community beyond the workplace, and successful strikes often depended on a community unionism that mobilized working-class families and formed cross-class alliances with local businesspeople. Gender ideologies had the potential to forge strong working-class solidarity, but they often fractured that solidarity at key moments.17 Similarly, ethnic diversity in mining towns could provide a powerful basis from which to challenge mining companies, but those moments of solidarity stood out against a backdrop of ethnic division.18
In Mine-Mill Local 890, different models of manhood coexisted and, at times, conflicted with one another.19 An aggressive masculinity, combined with the breadwinner ethic, proved important in creating class and ethnic solidarity during the years in which workers first built their union in Grant County. Men created fraternal bonds based on shared work experiences in a highly sex-segregated industry, and they used these bonds from which to challenge management’s paternalism. But when women’s picket duty in the Empire Zinc strike called upon men and women to rethink their household relations, this same model of masculinity suddenly threatened the very class and ethnic solidarity it had helped to build. The union leadership had both encouraged militant masculinity and introduced a more broadly based idea of the working class—one based in the larger community rather than limited to the workplace. In this manner the leadership opened the door to women’s participation in union activities, which would, in the context of the Empire Zinc strike, ultimately challenge the power relations predicated upon militant masculinity.
Women’s rebellion against male domination lies at the heart of both the Empire Zinc strike and Salt of the Earth. It deserves exploration, coming as it did from Mexican Americans (whose culture had a powerful, if complicated, tradition of patriarchal authority) and during a period when the “feminine mystique” permeated Anglo American culture. The women’s rebellion grew from their own class consciousness, which both resembled that of their husbands and diverged from it in critical ways. Women’s class consciousness had two sources: their own work experiences as Mexican American housewives in working-class mining camps, and their eventual participation, under the aegis of family meetings and the ladies’ auxiliary, in union business. Before the Empire Zinc strike, women’s activities were clearly auxiliary. But the strike’s temporary reversal and general upheaval of gender-based responsibilities threw women into a situation that transformed their political consciousness and permitted them to question male authority in the household. Thus they directed the union’s attention to the households that made up the community on which the strike depended. The return to the earlier division of labor after the strike, however, shows that a change in gender consciousness alone did not permanently transform power relations. Without a different sexual division of labor and a stronger feminist movement, the changes proved temporary.
The experiences of these housewives reveal the importance of feminism in Mexican American labor history, even where feminist organizations were absent.20 I take feminism to mean the recognition that women are subordinate to men, the belief that this subordination is not natural, and the conviction that an end to male domination is both possible and desirable. Mexican American women were introduced to a left-wing feminism associated with the CP, which condemned what it termed “male chauvinism,” and this may have given them a language with which to critique male authority.21 Chicana feminists have rightly challenged scholarship that blindly applies categories and theories developed in Anglo feminism to the situations of women belonging to other groups.22 The story of this strike shows that feminism as an ideology may have come originally from outside but that working-class Mexican American women understood and used it in the context of their own lives. Encountering their husbands’ resistance during the Empire Zinc strike, Mexican American women insisted on profound changes in the relations of husbands to wives. And like other Mexican American activists of the period, these women united community and family concerns in a way that did not affirm the conservative family politics of the 1950s.23
It was women’s activism and the conflict-ridden but also solidaristic story of husbands and wives that attracted Hollywood filmmakers to Grant County. A shared experience of Cold War repression and similar antiracist class politics brought miners and artists together. These two groups had little else in common: class background, work experiences, and ethnicity divided them.24 These divisions were exposed, for instance, in the filmmakers’ tendency to romanticize “the workers,” “the Mexican Americans,” “the people.” The collaboration on Salt of the Earth offers an unusual window on the Left during this period precisely because of these differences. The parties understood that their collaboration would be difficult, and they set up a production committee composed equally of Hollywood people, men from the union, and women from the auxiliary. This formal structure and the centrality of the gender story in Salt of the Earth together reflect the power that women had gained in the strike and continued to exercise thereafter. Left-wing artists did not apply rigid formulas to interpreting the mining families’ stories, and they permitted the families to exercise final say over the script. Mining families’ eager participation and vocal opinions about the way the story should be told show that issues of culture and representation mattered greatly to working-class Mexican Americans—these were not esoteric issues. The history of the film collaboration reveals people laying claim to the ways the world would see them.
Language is a complicated matter, and my own usage requires some explanation at the outset. The terms people at the time (1930s–1950s) used to describe ethnic, racial, and national identities are confused and confusing: “Mexican,” “Mexican American,” “Spanish American,” “Hispanic,” “Spanish-speaking,” and “manitos” (a New Mexican word) have been used interchangeably to describe people of Mexican descent. In general, I refer to people of Mexican descent as “Mexican American,” adopting usage that union members promoted. This term, however, often conflates Mexican nationals with U.S. citizens; where the distinction is important to the story at hand, I make it. Moreover, vocabulary sometimes reveals a speaker’s particular perspectives on class, citizenship, and other issues. In those instances, I try to unpack the term. In keeping with local usage, I use “Anglo” for non-Mexican Americans, regardless of their own national or ethnic background, unless they are clearly identified by other terms.
I should explain how I identify people as “Mexican American” or “Anglo.” In general, I have relied on people’s surnames as markers of their heritage, although I am fully aware of this technique’s limitations, particularly because intermarriage between Mexican Americans and Anglos is not uncommon. But by checking my use of surnames against other evidence, I believe I have arrived at reasonable approximations of the numbers of Mexican Americans and Anglos in the region. A close reading of the manuscript censuses allowed me to track intermarriage and other details, which I was then able to use to make arguments about the pull of Mine-Mill as a Mexican American labor organization. In 1930, the Census Bureau classified Mexicans as a separate race, which in turn caused political protest. The census data are also full of classification oddities, as illustrated by Tom Allison and his family. The census tells us that Tom, a white man, was married to Carmen, a Mexican woman; their children were all classified as “Mexican,” as was Tom’s mother, Nora, who lived with them.25
On a more abstract level, I use the term “ethnicity” in describing the ways that certain identifications mattered, or came to matter, to the people in this story; I use the term “race” when they themselves used the term. Race as a biological category does not exist, and I believe that to use the term uncritically is to grant its use a legitimacy it does not merit and is, itself, a racist practice.26 Racism and racial thinking are historical phenomena, though, and I do not intend that my use of the term “ethnicity” should erase the politics of racism. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that many people of Mexican descent have used the term “raza,” which does not translate exactly as “race”; instead, it connotes family, history, culture, and politics.27
This book is arranged in three parts, after a brief introduction to Grant County’s mining district (Chapter 2), and it moves chronologically through several episodes in the strike and film production. Each chapter begins with one such episode then analyzes in detail the themes raised by it. Part I shows what was at stake in the Empire Zinc strike and explains the strikers’ organizational and ideological resources in responding to two crises, one generated by the company and the other generated by the union itself in responding to the first crisis. Chapter 3 begins with the court injunction that threatened to paralyze the strike. This injunction serves as a symbol of labor relations early in the Cold War and, more broadly, of the evolving political order that reinstalled anticommunism in management’s arsenal. The chapter then explains the Depression-era origins of Local 890 and its development in the changing political landscape of the 1940s. Mine-Mill organized Mexican American men, and some Anglos, by fusing class and ethnic goals in the name of a shared brotherhood and by generating a strong leadership out of the rank and file. Thus, by the time Mine-Mill came under attack for its alleged Communist affiliation in 1948, Mexican American miners were primed to interpret anticommunism as a shabby pretext for returning Grant County to an earlier class and racial order.
Chapter 4 begins with another scene of crisis, this one occasioned by women trying to solve the injunction problem. In a contentious union meeting, women proposed to take over the picket lines, and their husbands balked. This conflict between men and women arose from a conflict between two forms of unionism, one a brotherhood and the other a family, corresponding to different visions of the union’s very composition. In itself, neither type of unionism challenged the family ideal of a male breadwinner and subservient female nurturer; indeed, the two models had developed alongside one another in the late 1940s. But the temporary inversion of gendered responsibility, implicit in the women’s proposal, exposed the power relations between husbands and wives that had seemed natural but that now blocked a resolution of the injunction crisis. By setting these two crises—the injunction and the women’s proposal—alongside one another, we can see not only their dynamic relation—in responding to one crisis the union created another—but also the complex workings of gender in battles over shared class and ethnic goals. The union’s composition and recent history positioned it to respond to the injunction—a threat from the outside—in a creative way that in turn challenged union members’ own gendered understandings and expectations of their union’s internal composition and goals: Were the men of Local 890 to allow women to assume center stage in this conflict? Because those expectations of women’s proper behavior were shared by management, the ability of the men and women of Local 890 to call them into question proved critical to overcoming management’s tactical advantage.
By looking at different aspects of the women’s picket, Part II tracks the events that reshaped and consolidated the union community. Both chapters in this part of the book cover the same chronological ground—from the start of the women’s picket on June 13, 1951, to the strike’s conclusion in January 1952—but do so by examining different themes. Chapter 5 follows women to the picket line and shows their changing political consciousness as they interacted with two political institutions—law enforcement and the courts—and with the international union’s leadership in Denver. Out of these interactions, women picketers came to see local political institutions as thoroughly corrupt, which, in turn, helped them to define the boundaries of their community ever more sharply and to perceive its place in the class struggle more clearly. They were joined in the process of marking off these boundaries by other townspeople, who found themselves forced to choose sides. Complicating the story was women’s challenge to the international leadership, which fired a popular organizer despite women’s loud protests. Chapter 6 follows the picketers back home, where they met with hostility from their own husbands, and explores the power relations in working-class families by examining women’s marriage choices and household labor in the context of a job market with few opportunities for women.
Part III examines the creation of a worker-artist alliance and its production of Salt of the Earth. Its chapters jump between Hollywood and Grant County, reflecting the difficulties this alliance faced in bridging the gap between two very different groups of people. Chapter 7 introduces the blacklisted filmmakers and describes their experiences of industry and government repression. Chapter 8 centers on the filmmakers’ vision of popular culture, one that would bring “real stories of real working people” into commercial theaters, and analyzes the mechanics of the worker-artist alliance that could achieve it. Union families were not just raw material for the screenplay; acting in the film was a way for the women and men of Local 890 to make sense of the conflicts caused by the strike and to make connections to audiences, and the production committee ensured that they influenced the way their story would be told. Chapter 9 traces the connections between national and local anticommunism during the film production. Just as making Salt of the Earth gave mining families the chance to make sense of their conflicts during the Empire Zinc strike, so too did local businesspeople’s violence toward the film crew recapitulate the violence between strikers and law enforcement—but with an added edge: the presence of blacklisted Hollywood people drew national attention, which in turn fueled local actions against the film crew and union members. The connections between local and national anticommunism were further strengthened by government persecution of Mine-Mill leaders, including Local 890’s international representative, Clinton Jencks.
The medium itself—film—transformed the immediate outcome of the strike into an enduring, and constantly renewed, lesson on class struggle, Mexican American history, gender, and the Cold War. As historian Frederick Cooper has shown in his analysis of Ousmanne Sembene’s 1960 novel God’s Bits of Wood, and its portrayal of a 1947 West African railway strike, the artistic representation “both complicates the task of the historian and lends it importance: the written epic may influence testimony, yet the fictional account enhances the sense of participants that their actions shaped history.”28 In the conclusion, I reflect on the significance of the Empire Zinc strike and Salt of the Earth, in part by following some of the historical characters into the next decades. Despite, or perhaps in part because of, the repression directed against the film’s production and distribution, Salt of the Earth has become a part of the film canon. Its ability to bring the story of Zinctown to generation after generation represents a victory for the blacklisted artists and for the mining families in Grant County, albeit a victory far removed from the film’s immediate origins. This additional dimension to the history of Mexican American mining families, their union, and their film makes the assessment of what really changed in terms of class or gender relations in Grant County only part of the story.