The court injunction delivered by Sheriff Goforth electrified the union community, and the union scheduled a community meeting for that very evening, June 12, 1951. Everyone associated with Mine-Mill was invited—Empire Zinc strikers, workers in other camps, wives, children, sisters, parents. Word of the injunction and the meeting to discuss it spread from home to home and from shift to shift. After their suppers, families walked or shared rides to the union hall in Bayard. On the outside, the union hall was a utilitarian box that looked like a military barracks, which, in fact, it had once been. But if the outside lacked character, the inside was a different story. Walls were decorated with posters and announcements (“Oppose the Smith Act! Down with Taft-Hartley!”) and Mexican woodcut illustrations; below the decorations hung sign-up sheets for picket duty and other committee work. At the front of the room, the American flag was displayed near Local 890’s Mine-Mill charter. The union had not always had a meeting place of its own. Locals and then units of the amalgamated union met wherever they could rent or borrow a space—usually a local tavern or the pool hall in Santa Rita, spaces that men were comfortable in, but not women. Then the local bought a government surplus building and had it moved north from Deming’s air force base to Bayard to serve the broader community of Local 890.
Around 7 P.M., the hall was starting to fill up and buzz with greetings and gossip. Women served coffee from the back of the hall. Folding chairs scraped and clattered as people made their way into rows of seats. Kids were shushed by their parents, and parents were quieted by the sharp rap of President Montoya’s gavel. He told the audience that they were there to decide what to do about the injunction. Montoya read the court order aloud, first in English and then in Spanish, and opened the floor for discussion. For awhile, the men argued over their pitiful options. A general strike? Too provocative, too risky, even though the union was strong in almost all of the local mines and mills. Ignore the injunction? Fines would multiply and men would be jailed in such numbers that the union would be destroyed. Give in? Absolutely not.1
After quite some time of this back-and-forth discussion, one woman raised her hand and was given the floor. She rose and asked, “Why not have women take over the pickets? The injunction spoke only of ‘striking miners.’” Women were not miners, she reminded the audience, “so they could picket and the sheriff would have no authority to stop them.”2 Surely no union man would object to such an ingenious way to circumvent the injunction without violating it.
But union men could object, and object they did. “What are you gonna do with the children?” they asked. “I’m sure not gonna take care of them!”3 Some men were afraid their wives would be physically hurt on the picket, while others, Virginia Chacón later recounted, thought that “shenanigans” would take place on the line—their wives would run off with other men.4 Her own husband, Juan, unequivocally opposed the women’s picket.5 But most of the women were fired up by the chance to take over the picket, eager to defend the union. The “stronger” women, in Anita Torrez’s words, declared that they would find something to do with the kids: If the men did not “want to share in working the problems out then we were gonna do our own problem-solving.”6
As much as the proposal seemed spontaneous, a bolt out of the blue, it was actually planned in advance by three women. Earlier that afternoon, Virginia Jencks, Virginia Chacón, and Aurora Chávez met to figure out how women might help the picketers. Just as a core of 890 leadership would often meet ahead of time to set a meeting’s agenda, these women in the ladies’ auxiliary had caucused ahead of time.
The union meeting was contentious and heated and lasted far into the night. Except for international representatives Clinton Jencks and Bob Hollowwa, men generally opposed a women’s picket.7 Women belonged at home. They had clothes to wash and kids to tend, and no one could take their place. The picket line was unpredictable; who knew how women might behave on it? How would it look for men to hide behind their women? And if women were hurt, men could only blame themselves for having exposed their wives and daughters to the violence, for they knew how rough the picket line could be.8 Women, by contrast, generally supported the proposal. They were excited at the prospect of something new, impatient with men’s closed-mindedness, and eager to get down to business. “We had a hard time convincing the men,” Braulia Velásquez commented later. “But we finally did by a vote.”9 Around 2:30 in the morning, with women voting alongside men—a provision granted to all auxiliaries by the international—Local 890 decided to send women to the pickets.10 The women immediately gathered to start planning their shifts. The first would begin at dawn.
The meeting on June 12 was so contentious and the arguments so hard-fought because the stakes were so high. The union faced a powerful enemy, one made even more powerful by its apparent control over local law enforcement. Women and men alike agreed that the union needed to be defended.11 Not only had Local 890 secured better wages, especially for Mexican Americans, but it had also pushed beyond the mines, mills, and smelters to challenge discrimination against Mexican Americans in local schools, stores, and government. Men and women, Anglos and Mexicans alike, supported the union’s mission.
But there was more at stake than defending the union against outside enemies: the very nature of the local union was in question, and battling it out in the union hall that night were two models of unionism. One was based on a brotherhood of men—and exclusively men—who had protected one another against the dangers of mining, their exploitation by management, and the calamities of unemployment, and who had asserted Mexican American dignity against an unjust political and social system. These experiences had, moreover, reinforced men’s claims to household authority as the breadwinners in their families. The other union model was based on a larger family of union supporters who, during strikes, made short-term sacrifices for long-term economic security, and who helped consolidate the union’s power beyond the workplace. The two models of unionism had coexisted peacefully until the injunction crisis forced the differences between them into the open. Under the new terms of labor conflict, either model could work only at the expense of the other.
Local 890 was used to crises that forced its members to rethink their tactics, and in this respect the injunction crisis was similar to episodes like the 1948 contract negotiations or the 1949 unemployment crisis: it opened up a space for a group of union supporters—in this case women—to scramble for creative solutions to a difficult problem. But the women’s proposal also differed from those situations. While union men certainly understood that Empire Zinc held the tactical advantage, they were nonetheless uneasy at making such a radical departure from the familiar tactics that had worked before. They did not want to commit to a course of action that would disrupt the normal workings of the family and thereby undermine their authority within the family. The prospect of such a disruption of the family order, which had served as the foundation for the union that men had built over the preceding few years, was deeply unsettling. For how could emasculated men ever defeat a powerful mining company? Moreover, women’s behavior in the union meeting threw open the question of who would decide the union’s course of action. As union men approached their dilemma based on the militant, democratic union that they had built during the 1940s, they were shocked to discover that the decision was not theirs alone to make.
For women, too, the proposal to take over the pickets was a startlingly new idea, although once the proposal was made, women saw that it followed logically from their recent auxiliary work. Its novelty gave the proposal a lot of power, for it was not what their adversaries expected of them—any more than their husbands did. The injunction crisis carved out a space for women to make a bold new move; it was the occasion for amplifying the union’s repertoire of tactics. This process was as exhilarating for women as it was disturbing to men. The proposal could only have been made by people who had come to sense their own power, which these women had done by gradually getting more involved in the union over the previous three years. The story of the women’s picket, then, a story taking place both on the line and in people’s homes, shows women and men debating their understandings of the union community and, in the process, remaking it.
Mining was indisputably men’s work. Everywhere that work went on, whether in the open-pit mine, an underground mine, a mill, or a smelter, men were doing it. As many historians have shown, mining has always had a masculine character, but masculinity has taken different forms in different settings and has changed over time. “Masculinity was clearly linked to class ideology,” historian Steven Penfold has argued, “but there was no automatic relationship between manhood and class. Indeed, gender definitions and their implications were highly contextual.”12 Over the course of the twentieth century, for example, Appalachian miners fostered two kinds of masculine identity corresponding to different periods of workers’ mobilization. Unionized miners of the 1930s defined true manhood as a worker’s vigorous challenge to management prerogative (and to management’s paternalism). But in a period of union retrenchment, these miners articulated and acted upon a different definition of manhood: one marked by hard work and the breadwinner ethic.13 In Chile, American capitalists tried to regulate workers’ sexuality and other behavior in order to create a more stable workforce. Miners resisted this effort with masculine practices like drinking, gambling, and refusing to settle down in marriage, yet they also drew upon their responsibility as breadwinners and upon the honor they attained through hard work in order to demand a family wage and fair treatment.14
Similar complexities mark the history of masculinity in Grant County’s mine industry. As miners built their union in the 1940s, they drew on, deliberately or not, models of the family to shape their relationships with one another. Already familiar with the horizontal and vertical relationships inherent in families, union men drew upon three sets of relationships—those of brothers, husbands, and fathers—in structuring the union. The union became a brotherhood made up of equals bound to one another by mutual needs, particularly the need for safety, and reinforced by the exclusion of women. Their fraternal equality (the kind of brotherhood they felt) was itself partly based on another set of family relationships: these men were equals not only because they had the same experiences at work but also because they each headed their own household, or aspired to do so. Male breadwinners exercised authority over the women and children in their families, quite apart from the fictive family in the union hall. Yet men achieved the status of breadwinner, from which their authority in the home derived, in the workplace. The democratic structure of the union was rooted in this brand of social equality. Still another dimension of their fraternity was its grounding in shared ethnicity and, at the same time, its capacity to transcend ethnic barriers and to attract Anglo workers to a brotherhood that affirmed the social equality of Mexican Americans and Anglos.
The miners’ union was much more than a fraternal club, of course. Its central purpose was to deal collectively with a powerful adversary: industrial management. Here, too, family relations and masculinity came into play, but with a twist. Management insisted that a family relationship structured the workplace. As Kennecott labor relations expert James K. Richardson instructed the New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, “Labor negotiations should be, in my opinion, family affairs. Don’t wash your dirty linens in public!”15 As in any industry, it was common for managers to speak of the company as one big family, working together but headed by a father; this approach corresponded to a notion that any differences between labor and management were “merely a misunderstanding by each party of the aims of the other. Each has a basic willingness to promote a free enterprise system.”16 In exerting paternalist control, management reassured workers that it knew best what workers’ interests were (because they were the same as the company’s) and how best to protect them. Managers were parents and workers were children. In the Southwest, this paternalism took on another dimension: Anglos were parents and Mexicans were children.
The union men, both Anglo and Mexican American, would have none of this. By no means did they consider themselves children. Manhood, after all, encompasses both masculinity and adulthood, and to accept the status of child meant to forego the status of man. Rather than behaving like the children in the company “family,” union men insisted on acting like adults. But what did it mean to act like an adult? Men taking responsibility for their union brothers and private families—the markers of manhood within the union—meant nothing to an employer who was trying to infantilize them. The situation required a different kind of masculinity: a combative, militant, aggressive masculinity. The relationship between worker and management was adversarial and not familial, and in rejecting the family model at the workplace, union men were laying claim to their own manhood. In parallel fashion, they rejected any natural Anglo authority over Mexican Americans.
This masculine character cemented the bonds of brotherhood, which were reinforced by the union’s language of brotherhood, a lexicon shared by all male unions, and its practice of holding its meetings in male spaces like bars or pool halls, which connected the work organization to masculine forms of leisure. Bars were an exclusively male preserve; few women entered them, and never alone. Thus men’s effort to build on and strengthen class and ethnic ties took place literally in the same space that fortified their sense of brotherhood.
Masculinity characterized mining; danger defined mining’s essence. Each time that trackman Felipe Bencomo hammered spikes into new track on a bench of the open-pit mine, that cager Cruz Torrez took men down hundreds or thousands of feet into an underground mine’s shaft, that powderman Luis Alvarado took dynamite out of its magazine or miner Pat Moreno loaded that dynamite into a hole, they put their lives and those of their coworkers in danger. To survive this danger, miners had to trust and protect one another. Their mutual dependence fostered fraternal bonds, as miners imported a form of family duty into the workplace. Reviewing several incidents in which men faced that danger can help clarify the relationship between men’s work processes and the obligations they felt toward one another, obligations that they strove to meet through their union.
Dynamite was one of the miner’s primary tools. Without careful handling, precise timing, and clear communication among workers, it was deadly. Communication turned out to be faulty in Peru Mining Company’s Kearney shaft on March 29, 1947.17 It was a Saturday night, and Delfino García and his partner, Joe Dimas, were drilling holes into the rock face on the 500-foot level. At the end of their shift, close to 11 P.M., they loaded the holes with dynamite and attached wires to each cartridge’s blasting cap before making their way the 300 to 400 feet from their stope to the shaft, where a cage was waiting to take them to the surface. J. D. Hughey was ready to detonate the charges they had just set. Hughey was a conscientious miner, already having made sure that the men on the next level down were clear in case debris fell down the chutes from the blast level, because, as he put it, “you have to watch out for yourself and your buddy.” To make sure the men on the blasting level were safe, he called out, “Is everyone clear?” One miner yelled back that Red and his crew were the only ones who might still be there. Another miner said that Red had already left, so Hughey threw the switch and the dynamite exploded, choking the area with dust and debris. But there were two men nicknamed Red, and only one had left the drift near the explosion. Oscar “Red” Jones was still on the 500 level with Jesse Worthington and Harry Porter. Men at the shaft station saw Red Jones stagger out of the blasted drift, ribs broken; they found the other two men deeper in the drift. They “tried to get [Worthington] to go out but he wanted to see about Porter first.” Porter, though, was dead from a skull fracture and lacerated brain. He was thirty-six years old, and this was his first shift at Peru. He left it in a bucket.
Miners at every camp were concerned with one another’s safety, but certain work arrangements made accidents more likely. The contract system, for instance, created risks because the lines of authority, responsibility, and communication were not always coextensive. Phelps-Dodge owned the Burro Chief mine at Tyrone and leased the fluorspar workings to H. E. McCray, a Silver City mining engineer. McCray, in turn, contracted with John Zelitti (himself a miner) to bring a crew to work each day. McCray and his foreman, Julio Tafoya, told Zelitti which stopes the miners should work each day. Tafoya was supposed to check conditions before each shift started, but he did not always then have time to tell the miners whether the rock needed barring down or timbering.18 This arrangement offered at best a loose net for safety, one through which miner LeRoy Jones fell to his death on May 9, 1947. The night before, Tafoya had noticed that part of a hanging wall—a twenty-five-foot slab of rock that looked deceptively stable—had fallen down in one of the stopes, but in the morning he “had to do some other work” and did not tell Zelitti. “I just forgot, I guess, but [the workers] are supposed to [check] it.”19 Jones and his partner, Jack Hales, were raking ore into a chute on the 265-foot level after a blast. After a while Hales went to cool off, and then he heard the “hanging wall” pull away from the “real” wall. He never saw it; “the wind from the concussion . . . knocked my light out.” Jones called to him, “Jack, pull me out,” but Hales could not reach him.20
When paid by the amount and grade of ore they mined, miners were apt to take shortcuts in safety. But pressure to take shortcuts also came directly from the manager, not just wage-hungry miners. Zelitti described three good mining practices and admitted that the Burro Chief followed only one of them—timbering—and then only “where it was bad enough.” Tafoya observed that McCray was sometimes a day late in getting timber to the site, once even failing to bring it at all. McCray told workers not to blast the hanging walls, because they were only waste ore, and a few weeks before the accident McCray yelled at Jones for blasting such a wall and ruining a car of high-grade ore.
Miners took their responsibility for one another very seriously, and concern for mine safety often engendered other forms of support. Often unions were first organized so that workers could give one another money when disaster struck; in this way they were like other kinds of fraternal organizations, which typically gave death benefits to workers’ families. Many such organizations existed in Grant County, and many funerals were arranged (if not always funded) by them. For the most part, fraternal-minded Mexican Americans did not belong to the same organizations as Anglos, choosing instead the Alianza Hispano Americana. The AHA was formed in Tucson in 1904, and within ten years the first Grant County lodge was organized in Silver City; by the 1940s, there were dozens of AHA lodges in the mining camps.21
Concern for mine safety also laid the basis for collective action. As one anonymous miner told the Silver City Daily Press shortly after the 1947 Peru explosion that killed Harry Porter, “It looks like the miners will have to join forces to make themselves stronger in order to live.” He demanded that the district court investigate the Peru mine, where two men had recently been killed and eight others injured.22 Safety was also the focus of Mine-Mill’s own activism from 1916 to 1934, the period when the union abandoned its call for class struggle.
Men’s shared status as the breadwinner in their families was also key to the union’s brotherhood. The breadwinner ethic held that men should provide the income for their families while women tended the home; in its working-class version, employers were expected to pay wages sufficient to support a family—the family wage. The breadwinner ethic prevailed in most parts of the United States, but it was especially strong in places like mining towns, which were built around industries with exclusively male workforces. Men and women alike frequently endorsed this division of labor, many women believing it their right to have a husband who provided for his family. During the Great Depression, for example, American men and women expressed outrage at women taking precious jobs away from men who needed to feed their families, even though many women were the sole providers for their families.23 Certainly not all miners headed households; a man’s work life usually started before his marriage, if he married at all. But the breadwinner was the standard for mining.
The breadwinner ideal underpinned much union activity, most obviously in the union’s demands for wage increases to match the rising cost of living. But we can see it in other aspects as well. Aware of its responsibilities to workers’ families, for example, the union tried to bring housing into company negotiations. Meeting with Empire Zinc’s management on August 29, 1949, Local 890’s bargaining team asked the company to promise not to raise rents on its Hanover houses. Mr. Francis, the company’s representative, cut off this discussion: “You talk as though the company must meet the cost of living. There is no guarantee to meet any cost of living. . . . Purchasing power theory is not true. [Rent increases] don’t belong in negotiations. The company is willing to discuss the things which belong here.”24
Men were understood to be the principal breadwinners even when they were out of work. After World War II, lead-zinc miners suffered two particularly harsh spells of unemployment when the market bottomed out. Because unemployment was not precisely a “workplace” issue—the problem obviously being one of not having a workplace—it was not taken for granted that a labor union would step in to address it. That Mine-Mill did shows that its members extended their responsibilities to one another beyond the workplace. Moreover, dealing with unemployment required union resources beyond the usual contracts and grievance machinery. Unemployed miners quickly organized themselves through Mine-Mill, gathering information on unemployed miners’ dependents and veteran status, both of which indicated male responsibility and status, and lobbying the governor and state legislature for extended unemployment benefits.
All of these actions reflected union men’s concern over being able to support their families and their sense that they could rely on their union brothers. Ernest Rodríguez, a member of Local 890’s Unemployed Committee, for instance, felt that it was important to organize the miners for reasons beyond the cash benefits they hoped to see. An organized community of miners would prevent “disorganized migration, which is an evil because it causes misery to children. It interrupts their education [and] makes it impossible to receive medical attention when needed.”25 At meetings for unemployed men, Local 890 took down the names and ages of each unemployed man’s dependents.26 The union used this information not only in allotting food relief but also to demonstrate how deserving of support these men were. Similarly, the union kept close tabs on the numbers of military veterans among the unemployed. Of fifty-four men on one list, eighteen identified themselves as veterans, though some people did not answer either way.27
Grant County did not immediately suffer from the postwar recession that everyone had feared. Employment dropped in 1946, but then it leveled out and even increased over the next two years; this was quite different from the years right after World War I, when Chino and Phelps-Dodge both shut down during a terrible recession.28 Unemployment, while troubling for any family, proved to be a transient problem in the years right after World War II. But by early February 1949, state employment officer Ray Strickland began to notice a shift in the pattern of layoffs, a shift that could not be explained by normal seasonal changes. Men were being laid off from jobs they had held for years.29 That spring, Peru Mining Company and the U.S. Smelting, Refining, and Mining Company (USSRMC) started laying off workers and curtailing production.
In early June, people still hoped that this was only a short aberration. The state employment service told Grant County’s anxious chamber of commerce that employment looked even better in 1949 than it had a year before. But just ten days later, miners found reason to disagree: Peru and Kennecott both stopped production at their zinc shafts, one in Hanover and the other in Santa Rita, and laid off 170 workers.30 A week later, sixty Empire Zinc workers faced layoffs as the company announced a reduced work week to begin July 1. But the biggest layoff bomb fell at USSRMC. That company announced on June 27 that it would completely shut down in Grant County the following day, throwing some 400 to 500 workers out of work with no warning. Crowds of them filled the local employment office.31 All told, about a thousand Grant County miners lost their jobs by the end of the month, driving the county’s unemployment rate to 15 percent, three times the rate for New Mexico as a whole.32 And it got worse from there. Despite promises that it would stay open, Asarco stopped all ore production in mid-July, laying off another 150 men.33 Strickland reported in August that 25 percent of Grant County’s workers were unemployed.34 The effects soon spread to “every important industry in the area between September and November.”35 Weekly unemployment benefits of $20 lasted only twenty weeks, and the state legislature was not in session to extend or increase them.
Faced with a dismal present and a worse future, unemployed miners began to organize immediately after USSRMC closed. They centered their activities in the union and soon expanded into the community at large, using a combination of publicity and pressure on particular political and government figures. They insisted that they were not asking for a “handout”: their past military service and present responsibilities as breadwinners entitled them to work.36 The day after USSRMC closed, Tony Queveda, Charles Morrell, Fidel Aragón, and Ernest Rodríguez formed a union committee and visited the local employment office. They demanded a special session of the state legislature to consider the unemployment crisis, a new public works program, and an end to the red tape that kept unemployed miners lined up around the block outside the employment office.37 Ray Strickland could do nothing to meet the first two demands, which required the governor’s, if not the president’s, intervention. That the miners went to him first thus appears somewhat misguided, a desperate scramble for help without finding out the proper channels. But their action is reminiscent of similar activism in the early 1930s, when unemployed councils and workers’ alliances pressed local authorities to come through with relief, thereby exposing the ineffectiveness of the system as a whole.38 Perhaps because he felt the gravity of the two demands he could not meet, Strickland immediately responded to the third: he brought in more employment officials to process claims more quickly. The unemployment office placed 300 unemployed miners in agricultural jobs, sent 38 to a Utah mine, and assigned another 210 to fight forest fires.39
The unemployed miners next organized a delegation to Governor Thomas J. Mabry. Six miners, all veterans, left Bayard on July 5, stopping to speak to interested crowds in Hot Springs and Socorro before arriving in Santa Fe the following morning.40 Governor Mabry barely gave them the time of day. As Ernest Rodríguez, a member of the delegation, noted, “He gave us a quick answer.” Clinton Jencks elaborated: “‘Good morning, good night, good-bye—that’s all I care to discuss.’”41 Mabry would not call a special session of the legislature at the miners’ request, but he said he might respond to similar pressure if it came from legislators. Over the next two months, Local 890’s unemployed committee showered state representatives with descriptions of the miners’ plight and appeals for a special session.42 But Mabry still declined to call a special session, choosing instead to appoint a commission to study the problem. “The cure,” he said, “should stem from Washington.”43
Mine-Mill’s unemployment activism relied in part on public spectacle. In mid-August, forty-two unemployed miners, veterans, and wives of unemployed miners traveled the state by caravan, each car “decorated with 5 full sized posters demanding jobs, no discrimination, and equal pay.”44 By the time they reached Santa Fe, however, Mabry had left town on vacation. The delegates met instead with Lieutenant Governor Joseph Montoya, requesting public works jobs and an extension of unemployment benefits beyond twenty weeks.45 Some unemployed workers got jobs building state roads, but the legislature did not extend their unemployment benefits. Local 890 then lobbied for surplus food to be delivered to unemployed miners’ families and for the state welfare department to provide more funds to indigent families, and the union’s membership authorized a transfer of strike funds to an unemployment fund. Only with the gradual reopening of the mines in 1950, however, did mining families regain some financial security.
Masculinity often carries with it one form or another of individualism, an assertion of self against other. The same workplace danger that required mutual help also required individual courage, and women’s absence from mines and mills ensured that this courage would be associated with men. Mine-Mill asserted workers’ individual and collective adulthood against management’s treatment of them as children. In the eyes of mining managers, Mexican workers were docile, prone to laziness, and indifferent to work conditions that “Americans” would not tolerate, and they needed the firm paternalistic governance that a mining company provided. This position, with its strands of class, culture, race, and gender ideologies, contributed to and justified the dual-wage system.
There were, of course, plenty of examples of Mexican and Mexican American workers who forcefully pressed their claims upon a bewildered management, both in Mexico and in the Southwest. Chino general manager Horace Moses probably had clear memories of Mexican American coal miners rising up in Gallup, where during the 1920s and 1930s he oversaw the Gallup American Coal Company and its violent repression of labor organizing. But these counterexamples only underscored, for management, the need for discipline. Managers variously saw Mexican Americans as docile or unruly and interpreted both as evidence of Mexican Americans’ cultural immaturity and inferiority. But from the standpoint of Mexican American miners, when they challenged management by joining Mine-Mill and demanding better wages and work conditions, they were also challenging both the cultural definition of Mexicans as ethnically or racially inferior and the paternalistic labor relations in the mines and mills. They vindicated both their manhood and their Mexican ethnicity by rejecting the deference that companies expected from them.
Two features of Mine-Mill fostered this kind of masculinity. First, by the late 1940s, many of its members were war veterans, and returning veterans were little disposed to tolerate the old racial order. They wanted to be treated with respect; they wanted their dignity and manhood honored. Veterans often took the lead in pursuing grievances, ensuring that management promoted workers according to clear lines of seniority, and organizing their fellow workers. The union leadership clearly valued this infusion of veterans. Union records regularly noted whether someone was a veteran, and the leadership stressed its members’ veteran status in its appeals to local opinion or state government. And although plenty of women served in the armed forces, the status of veteran was very clearly a masculine one: these were men who had risked their lives fighting for the country.46 In this manner, affronts to these men’s dignity and manhood—as, for example, might be found in a paternalist mining company—were cast as affronts to the nation’s own honor.47
Second, Mine-Mill itself became more adversarial toward the companies after World War II, a change that reflected changes in Communist Party (CP) policy. As we saw in Chapter 3, once the United States entered World War II, Mine-Mill observed the no-strike pledge to the letter; the party and the union alike pressed for all-out war production. For many labor leaders in the United States at the time (and for historians since then), this policy fundamentally compromised workers’ power. But in the Southwest, Mine-Mill organizers used the no-strike pledge to claim legitimacy. With this political capital, they insisted that discrimination against Mexican Americans jeopardized war production. During the war, then, Mine-Mill abandoned one aspect of militancy—strikes—while reinforcing another aspect—uncompromising assaults on the dual-wage system.
After the war, the CP rejected what was labeled “Browderism.” Earl Browder, longtime leader of the U.S. party, had imagined that the United States and the Soviet Union could and likely would coexist peacefully (he based this on Roosevelt’s and Stalin’s behavior at the 1943 Teheran conference); as a corollary, Browder predicted a softening of class struggle in the United States and less need for communists to have a political party. Toward the end of World War II, though, pressure from abroad persuaded American Communists to abandon this “revisionist” position and prepare for a full-scale assault by capitalists, which would culminate in a war of capitalism against socialism.48 Along similar lines, Mine-Mill in the Southwest reclaimed strikes and shop-floor conflict as definitive characteristics of militancy. Leo Ortiz, an international organizer who occasionally visited Grant County, urged Kennecott locals to prepare “for the [coming] negotiation . . . , which is going to be a tough one to settle, because the odds are against the working man since the war ended. So we must really get down to business and work harder than ever so that we can keep all of the things that we gained during the war by the aid of the War Labor Board.”49 “If we have the guts to stand firm,” the chairman of the national Kennecott Council told his union brothers, “we’ll get at least the national pattern. If we’re gutless we throw away those millions [of Kennecott’s profits] and lose our self respect, and the Companies will laugh up their collective sleeve.”50
American industrialists did in fact go on the offensive after overwhelming waves of strikes in 1945 and 1946. Moreover, companies like Asarco and USSRMC used the unemployment crises of 1949 and 1950 to try to win wage concessions from its workers. Mine-Mill’s insistence that it was both militant and democratic was part of its strategy to deal with the turning political and economic tide: it was militant because it rejected what it considered the class collaboration of other CIO unions, and it was democratic because its members voted on all questions before it. It was a “fighting union” that was not afraid to stand up to the bosses.
Local 890 went on the counteroffensive. As we saw in Chapter 3, workers without contracts started striking at the slightest provocation. Some union grievances hinted at workers’ attempts to defend their dignity, and the rhetoric of masculinity regularly appeared in the union’s descriptions of encounters with management. Utimio Udero, for instance, protested a foreman’s “unjust” complaint against him and reported with satisfaction that the foreman “got pretty bad marks for himself” as a result.51 Clinton Jencks exhorted union men to “sit up tight against the company and show our powers. . . . The unions are to be prepared to stop [it] in [its] tracks.”52 Later that month, Jencks asked Chino general manager Horace Moses, “What’s it going to be, strike or settlement?” Moses first balked, but then, seeing that the Kennecott workers would go out on strike, he changed his mind. As Local 63’s secretary recorded, “So far we have reached the point that we have made the company say uncle although the fight is not over yet. We got to maintain our readings because we got fighting to do. Keep pressure up.”53 This union officer connected forceful action with the political education that Mine-Mill provided, both tactics helping to establish new class relations in the mines: forcing a company to “say uncle,” after all, is hardly the action of a dutiful son. A final area of Mine-Mill activism took place at the inquests held to investigate mine fatalities. Beginning in 1947, Jencks started attending these inquests. At first he was not permitted to ask questions, but soon he became a regular figure at the inquests and joined in questioning the witnesses and managers.
Certainly the union enjoyed no monopoly on asserting masculinity. Albert Mracek, editor of the New Mexico Miner and Prospector in Silver City, burst with gendered rhetoric when he exhorted mining men to join the New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association in April 1944:
If you want to be out in front where the danger is, and where the men get separated from the boys; if you want to be dug into the fox holes of industry when we’ve liquidated the last of the Huns and the little yellow b-b-brothers; if you want to be in there cursing and pounding the table in the interests of fair play and common sense when the post-war plans are being drawn in final form; if you want to tackle reconstruction with the cold steel of confidence in your outfit; if you want to play your part in fighting off government of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats and for the bureaucrats; and if you want to look ’em in the eye as they come back from the hell of Europe and the South Pacific, and not flinch.54
Companies extended their power far beyond the district’s mines, mills, and smelters, and Mine-Mill soon felt powerful enough to challenge the wider political economy. Some companies owned their camps outright; others influenced schools, churches, and town governments indirectly. Segregation, which defined most aspects of local society, was not neutral; it was pernicious, and union men assaulted it with the same urgency that characterized their work-related dealings with companies. Mine-Mill Local 890 became more than a labor union in the late 1940s. It became a political and civil rights organization, too, attacking those institutions that favored rich over poor, Anglo over Mexican American.55
Not all of this was new, of course; Mine-Mill had formed a political action committee as early as 1942, when it endorsed Democratic candidates and registered voters.56 Political work moved to center stage in the fall of 1944 when the CIO’s Political Action Committee mobilized unions across the country to register voters. Seferino Anchondo and Verne Curtis, international representatives for Mine-Mill in Grant County, opened an office on Bullard Street in Silver City to promote Roosevelt’s candidacy and the sale of war bonds.57
But there was a difference between this activism and that which took place later in the decade. In 1948 the union launched its own candidates under the banner of the New Party (later called the Independent Progressive Party). This move signaled that union men were abandoning a second-class status, that they were laying claim to the political tools long denied them; it also indicated the union’s distance from the mainstream CIO and closeness to the CP.58 Early in January 1948, Local 890’s executive board started talking about a third party. Local 890 voted unanimously to endorse Henry Wallace for president at its February 26 meeting and linked the two main parties to monopoly capitalism, which it held responsible for deepening racial discrimination. “Workers in this section of our nation,” the union declared, “particularly feel the pressure of the corporations and their straw bosses. Mexican-American workers see monopoly capital used to keep discrimination alive. Any division of race means lack of unity in contract demands. Men divided, even by the myth of race superiority, cannot fight effectively for better wages and working conditions.”59
Nominated for U.S. senator was Brígido Provencio, a forty-two-year-old Kennecott employee at Hurley. Provencio grew up in Grant County and farmed before heading to the mines. Before the amalgamation, Provencio was an officer in Local 69; afterward, he represented the Hurley workers on Local 890’s executive board. Also running were Clinton Jencks for U.S. representative, Juan Chacón for state senator, Magdaleno Luján for Grant County sheriff, and Henry Jaramillo for state representative.60 About thirty people traveled to El Paso for a Wallace rally in October, with Local 890 covering some of the transportation costs.61
Local 890 did not completely abandon the Democrats: Albert Muñoz, who presided over Local 890’s Santa Rita unit and represented Santa Rita workers on 890’s executive board, filed that year for the Democratic nomination for state senator.62 Muñoz had lived in Santa Rita all his life, except for a brief stint at Eastern New Mexico Junior College in Portales, and he studied law by correspondence with LaSalle University in Chicago. Like many Mine-Mill activists, Muñoz served in the armed forces during World War II, first as a machine gunner and then as a laboratory technician with the medical corps.63 He lost the Democratic primary in June but garnered a respectable 1,344 votes to C. C. Royall Sr.’s 2,471.64
The Wallace campaign failed in Grant County as it did all over the country. Grant County voters backed Harry Truman over Thomas Dewey by 3,530 votes to 1,997; Wallace claimed 107 votes. Local New Party candidates, though not winning office, fared slightly better. Provencio got 129 votes, Jencks got 149, and Chacón got 126; Magdaleno Luján, though, got only 75 votes.65 Some voters had faith in the abilities and commitment of Jencks, Chacón, and Provencio, but they did not follow those union leaders into Wallace’s camp.66
Muñoz’s bid and the Wallace campaign failed, but they revealed a sense of entitlement: Mexican Americans believed themselves worthy of holding elected office. Backing Juan Chacón, Brígido Provencio, and others signaled that some people in the union believed that Mexican American workers had something to offer.67 They built on the groundwork laid by a few Mexican Americans who gained prominence in state and county party machinery. Among them was Joe V. Morales, a cousin of Joe T. Morales, who worked at Santa Rita and who portrayed Sal Ruiz in Salt of the Earth. Joe V. Morales owned the Silver Tavern, a bar in Silver City. He spoke regularly at political rallies in Grant County and was “in demand as a spellbinder over the state, his speeches in Spanish especially arousing partisan enthusiasm among the native people.”68
If Mexican American candidates were relatively new, the “Spanish vote” was already understood to be important, at least in some elections. Many campaigns went by in which no candidates specifically appealed to Mexican Americans, but two Silver City mayoral elections, in 1947 and 1951, suggest that a Mexican American voting bloc mattered to candidates and, possibly, to Anglo voters.69 By the 1950s, Mine-Mill held the balance of power in many local elections. Even if politicians disliked the “red” union, Local 890 activist Lorenzo Torrez recalled, they liked its members’ votes.70 Candidates often sought union endorsement, which suggests that the union either reflected or shaped the voting practices of its members.
Local 890 supporters were decisive in at least one 1950 election. In the fall of 1950, shortly after the Empire Zinc strike began, Local 890 mobilized its members and their wives to drive Sheriff Bartley McDonald, a local rancher and Democrat associated with an explosive case of police brutality in the town of Fierro in May 1949, from office. They backed Republican Leslie Goforth instead, and Goforth edged McDonald out by a slim margin. As became obvious during the Empire Zinc strike, however, Goforth hardly proved a steady friend to the union.
The Fierro case, as the 1949 police brutality incident came to be known, sparked the formation of a local chapter of a new national civil rights organization, the Asociación Nacional Mexicana Americana, or ANMA.71 ANMA’s mission was to promote Mexican American dignity by defending Mexican Americans’ political and cultural rights.72 Wherever Mexican Americans suffered police brutality, be it in Fierro, New Mexico, or Los Angeles, California, ANMA came out in protest. Early in the 1950s, it boycotted The Judy Canova Show because of the stereotyped cartoon character “Pedro,” whose simpering voice was provided by Mel Blanc, and persuaded the show’s sponsor to withdraw support.73 ANMA worked with the left-wing Committee for the Protection of the Foreign-Born to defend Mexican Americans, particularly working-class leaders, against deportation.74 The organization publicized the difficulties facing miners in New Mexico and beet workers in Colorado. And when the Empire Zinc strike began, it organized a campaign to support the strikers, identifying the strike as one of the most important in protecting Mexican American rights.
ANMA’s defense of young Mexican American men in the Fierro case was an example of union members’ assertions of dignified manhood not only in the workplace but also increasingly in society at large. The case grew out of a confrontation between two deputy sheriffs, Lem Watson and Albert Parra, and some young miners at the Fierro Nite Club on the night of Saturday, April 30, 1949. Rubén Arzola, one of the miners, left the dance hall with a friend around midnight, and Watson arrested him outside the club for drunk and disorderly conduct; Arzola’s friend protested, and Watson arrested him as well.75 First Watson told the two friends to get in the back seat of his police car, but then he told them to move to the front seat. At this point, the accounts by union people and the deputy sheriff sharply diverged.
In the union version, Watson began to beat Arzola when the latter tried to move to the front seat. A crowd soon gathered outside the dance hall. “The dancers verbally protested against Watson’s physical abuse of Arzola,” stated an ANMA-produced fact sheet. “Thereupon Watson—who is notorious throughout Grant County for his anti-Mexican feelings—pulled out his pistol. He first shot Rubén Arzola in the leg, and then giving way to his inner feelings, shot his guns into the crowd. Under this rain of bullets two others were wounded; Lopi Márquez in the leg and Valdemar Herrera in the arm. . . . It was only after Watson had fired his guns, that the people in self-defense and anger began to throw rocks at his car and finally overturned it.”76 ANMA criticized Watson alone, making no mention of Parra, a Mexican American.
The deputy sheriffs saw things differently. Relating their account, the Silver City Daily Press emphasized the risk that both officers took during the incident: “The mob—an estimated fifty persons—attacked the two officers and turned the prisoners loose. . . . Arzola was shot while assert-edly [sic] fleeing [and] Lupe Rodríguez ‘apparently was hit by a stray bullet.’ Watson and Parra told [Sheriff Bartley] McDonald that they had to draw guns in self defense after the mob swept over them, hit Watson with a rock, and overturned their automobile.”77 Arzola went to the county jail, and Márquez, according to ANMA, went to the hospital.
But the episode did not end there, for the next day the sheriffs rounded up several more men at the Zarape Nite Club in Bayard. Two union representatives, Jencks and Local 890 president Angel Bustos, went to the police station to see who had been arrested. They could not get a full list, so Jencks returned Monday morning. McDonald told Jencks that “only a minister, a lawyer or a doctor could see the prisoners.” “He told me,” McDonald continued, “he was counsel for the prisoners and I told him he wasn’t a lawyer and, as far as I was concerned, could quit meddling with the case.”78 Jencks left, and the sheriff’s department continued to arrest men in the mining district; ten men in all spent time in jail. Jencks returned on Thursday with attorney C. C. Royall Jr., in order to check the disposition of those cases that had not yet reached the docket of Justice of the Peace Andrew Haugland. Local 890 was worried that the detainees were not having charges brought against them and were not being permitted to see their families.79 This encounter ended with a “one-punch fight.” McDonald told Jencks that they “were arraigning the prisoners as fast as possible.” Then, McDonald continued, “[Jencks] called me a liar. I got mad and let him have one. I’m sorry it happened but I don’t like to be called a liar.”80 Jencks did not admit having called McDonald a liar. “I [was] not trying to stick up for anyone who is guilty,” he explained. “[I wanted] to see that those who are arrested get an even break. McDonald got mad and hit me.”81
The shootings, arrests, and assault led Mine-Mill leaders to call a meeting for the following evening, May 6. Three hundred people reportedly showed up to hear testimony “of police brutality [from] those who had been picked up or interrogated.” They created the Grant County chapter of the Asociación Nacional Mexicana Americana, electing officers and issuing four demands:
A month later, ANMA financial secretary Arturo Flores reported that petitions to remove Watson had over 300 signatures, 200 people had joined ANMA, and the Fierro defendants now had a defense committee and lawyers to represent them.83
ANMA continued its defense of young Mexican American men in Grant County, even when the organization was otherwise defunct. By 1953, the national office listed no members in New Mexico or Texas, and ANMA letterhead was widely in use as scrap paper, if Local 890’s archives are any gauge.84 Yet there is some evidence that Grant County’s ANMA revived its activities when a particular situation called upon its expertise. Early in 1953, for instance, union notes made during the filming of Salt of the Earth refer to getting ANMA’s help for two Mexican American youth. Pete Peña, a sixteen-year-old from Hurley, was hard of hearing and had difficulty in school. His teacher wanted to put him in reform school, and ANMA tried to get a doctor’s statement documenting Peña’s medical condition. ANMA also secured legal services for Louis Márquez, age seventeen, who was in jail awaiting trial for stealing a crank shaft.85
ANMA was the most concrete example in Grant County of class-based organizing to redress racial discrimination in all areas of society. While it was intended to be a cross-class organization of Mexican Americans and sympathetic Anglos, all of its leaders were affiliated with Mine-Mill. Its mesa directiva (board of directors) in 1949 and 1950 included Alberto Muñoz, president; José Carrillo, vice president; Arturo Flores, financial secretary; and members Cipriano Montoya, Clinton Jencks, Henry Jaramillo, and Albert Vigil. Women were conspicuously absent from leadership positions in Grant County’s chapter of ANMA, a fact all the more remarkable given ANMA’s use of family iconography and its efforts to organize families, not just individuals, in California.86
ANMA entered politics both locally and in the state at large. It registered voters in Grant County, and with help from Local 890’s Political Action Fund, it paid workers for the wages they lost if they spent election day driving voters to the polls. It even sent its own members to El Paso to register Mexican Americans there, which was a bold challenge to the political order because Texas was well known for its disfranchisement of African Americans and Mexican Americans. Lorenzo Torrez, who led ANMA’s state chapter in 1951, recalled the campaign to elect a Mexican American mayor in El Paso: “The problem in Texas was that in order . . . to register to vote, you had to have property. So we went, and we recruited people to register, and we argued successfully—I don’t remember if we had lawyers—that a ring was property. A watch was property. And in that way we forced the county to accept the registration of hundreds of voters. You had to transport them to the courthouse, so we went from Bayard. And the mayor got elected when it came to vote.”87 Torrez remembered that ANMA helped bring legal suits against restrictive housing covenants.88 The state chapter of ANMA, over which Arturo Flores presided in 1949, also tracked the situation of braceros in El Paso and lobbied state officials about Grant County’s unemployment.89 And in league with the union’s ladies’ auxiliary, ANMA publicized school segregation in Silver City. It hoped to use the information it gathered—on the quality of schools, facilities, books, and teachers—to present a case before New Mexico’s Fair Employment Commission.90
ANMA accomplished a great deal, both nationally and in Grant County, but it existed only a short while. There are hints that membership was flagging in the early 1950s, which one activist, writing to Mine-Mill’s Maurice Travis from California, attributed to top-down leadership. But the real demise came at the hand of the U.S. attorney general, who promulgated a list of “subversive organizations” that, by definition, were required to register with the Department of Justice as foreign agents. Many leftist organizations landed on this list, and the measure harmed the designated organizations whether they registered properly or not. For ANMA in 1953, already weakened by threats of deportation of several leaders, the general atmosphere of McCarthyism, and its own structural problems, the attorney general’s list was the last straw: ANMA disbanded in December 1953.
Influencing Local 890’s and ANMA’s activism was the CP’s theoretical position on Mexican Americans. Recognizing that oppression of Mexican Americans was similar to that of African Americans, Communists relied on considerations of “the Negro Question” in interpreting Mexican American conditions. But Communists also recognized that Mexican Americans occupied a social, economic, and historical position different from that of African Americans; for this reason, there came to be a greater—albeit inconsistent—emphasis on culture and nationality as Communists connected “Anglo chauvinism” and American imperialism to the denigration of Mexican culture. Anglo chauvinism combined national and racial prejudices.91 While Anglo chauvinism possessed different historical roots from white chauvinism, the consequences were similar: appalling living conditions, poor health, few job opportunities beyond manual labor, and residential segregation.92 San Antonio labor activist Emma Tenayuca and her husband, Texas Communist leader Homer D. Brooks, wrote one of the most penetrating analyses of the conditions facing Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals in the Southwest. They advocated a program that took language and culture into account, as well as the material conditions of segregation, economic exploitation, and political repression.93 All of these considerations found expression in the activism of Local 890 and of ANMA in New Mexico.
Local 890 broadened its mission in the late 1940s to include civil rights activism, and the union’s leadership saw that this larger mission required a wider and deeper base of support. Moreover, many union men understood how much workplace struggles—especially strikes—depended on family and community support. Wives who misunderstood why their husbands went on strike were likely to pressure their husbands to go back to work. Consequently, at the same time that Local 890’s leadership promoted a masculine militancy, it was also advancing a different vision of the union community—the union family.94
The impetus for women’s and community organization lay with the Jenckses, both of whom had backgrounds in community organizing and were familiar with labor history, in which women’s participation had proven critical. “Without women,” Clinton Jencks later observed, “the union was organizing with one hand tied behind its back.”95 Moreover, the Jenckses belonged to a political culture that was beginning to refine a class-conscious feminism. The CP had drawn many women into its activities, especially in neighborhoods ravaged by the Depression. But the party had been rather theoretically vacant on “the Woman Question,” as the problem of sexism was called. To Communists, feminism was, by definition, bourgeois, for it masked the real class struggle and advanced bourgeois women at the expense of working-class women. Feminists argued for an equal rights amendment in the 1930s and 1940s, while Communists, trade unionists, and progressives opposed it for fear of dismantling the protective labor legislation that, they believed, benefited women workers.96 At some odds with this model were “labor feminists,” as historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has called them, who also opposed the equal rights amendment and used labor organizing of working-class women to advance a broader agenda of social justice.97
Still, the late 1930s and 1940s had witnessed some Communist considerations of the Woman Question that transcended the simplistic maxim that women’s status could approach equality with men’s only after a socialist revolution. Mary Inman’s 1939 book, In Woman’s Defense, began with Friedrich Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: men began to subjugate women when men began to accumulate private property.98 To this Inman added the insight that housework was a form of productive social labor worthy of Communist organizing and agitation.99 This was not a new insight—Socialist women earlier in the century had similarly critiqued housework—but it would prove central to the gender politics depicted in Salt of the Earth.100 The party hierarchy, however, disavowed Inman’s analysis.101 Still, even though the CP barely acknowledged women’s issues, it was an institution in which men could be criticized for being “backward on the Woman Question.”102 This room to criticize men for sexism made the CP unique among male-dominated political institutions.
And more than in official publications, the Woman Question received attention in informal discussions and in organizations beyond the party’s direct control. There we find hints that women were raising substantive issues that men, and male leaders, were likely to dismiss as trivial. Betty Millard, a Communist journalist who wrote on Latin America (and visited Grant County on one of her speaking tours), authored the pamphlet Woman against Myth (1948), drawing attention to women’s history and to the psychological, economic, and legal dimensions of “delimiting . . . women to the role of wife and mother.”103 Her pamphlet is notable for its celebration of nineteenth-century feminists without dismissing them for their class background; in it Millard lamented the vast historical ignorance of women’s struggles. In this respect, Woman against Myth resembles the work taken up by the Congress of American Women (CAW), a women’s organization that attracted women from a range of political beliefs. The CAW pushed a leftist agenda that did not trivialize women’s issues and emphasized the importance of women’s history; prominent women’s historians Gerda Lerner and Eleanor Flexner belonged to this organization.104 It should come as no surprise, then, that Millard belonged to the CAW.105
Inspired by new views like these, as well as by her own background in political organizing, Virginia Jencks walked house to house in Grant County’s mining towns, knocking on doors and striking up conversations with miners’ wives. She encouraged them to come to union meetings, where families would eat, play games, perhaps watch a movie, or talk about political issues. Virginia Chacón, who soon joined Jencks, found that “some women were interested, but it sounded like they were scared” of their husbands.106 Indeed, it took some doing to get men to invite their wives to union meetings. Clinton Jencks worked first on the executive committee, repeatedly urging union officers to bring their wives to meetings, and these men then tried to persuade others in their work units.107
The power of voting probably helped some women get more involved in union activities. At Local 890’s meeting to discuss the injunction, women were voting alongside men—or, more accurately in this case, against them. Their numbers ensured that the resolution would get taken seriously; had men alone voted, there is little chance that the women’s picket would have taken shape. The right for auxiliary members to vote was a provision of the international union, confirmed at its 1936 convention. There Ida Smith and T. L. Williams of Montana’s newly formed auxiliaries reminded their union brothers that the auxiliaries paid fees to the international and to deny women the vote was to practice taxation without representation. Their resolution carried, and the women also helped defeat a counterresolution that would explicitly deny women voting privileges.108 Women in other CIO auxiliaries were “astounded beyond words” that Mine-Mill women were “given a voice and a vote on the convention floor.”109 The Mine-Mill union thus granted a formal right that Local 890 would extend into the local union’s business.
The parameters of Local 890’s woman suffrage are unclear, however, and we should not exaggerate Mine-Mill’s commitment to women’s equality. The international auxiliary had no money to work with—just the international’s postage, for which they were duly thankful—and found few men actually willing to help local auxiliaries get started.110 Auxiliaries always got the leftovers. In 1941, one auxiliary complained that “the membership books provided by the international offices for the auxiliaries are of such a poor quality that they fall to pieces after a year’s use, and . . . so outdated that they state on the front cover that we are affiliated with the A.F. of L.—which we resent.”111 And, most importantly, men seem to have been uneasy about women’s participation in their conventions. There was a lot of nervous jocularity about women wearing the pants, or men trying to keep women tied to the bedpost, comments that diverted serious discussion into frivolous channels that eventually dried up. In 1940, for instance, men constantly resorted to jokes when they introduced or responded to women speakers. But Ora Valentine of Park City, Utah, put her foot down. “I don’t know why it is that every time the ladies get up it is taken for something funny. That is all right. You are laughing at us. You fellows earn your money and bring it home—and I hope you give it to your wives to spend—but unless your wives are organized, they do not care whether the money goes for a union-made article or a scab article.”112 To protest that behavior, as Valentine did, was to run the risk of even more ridicule; that she was not further ridiculed testifies to the willingness of at least some men to accord her some respect.
Conflict over communism was refracted through Mine-Mill’s gender politics, too. In 1947, the president of the international auxiliary, Mary Orlich of Butte, Montana, began agitating against the international’s left-wing leadership. Montana Mine-Mill activists denounced her “for meddling in union men’s affairs.” Fights over communism were ugly everywhere, but because of the particular relation of the auxiliary to the international union, the conflict took on a gendered dimension: the international executive board was in a position to dissolve the auxiliary, essentially deeming it unfit to govern itself.113 President Maurice Travis told all local auxiliaries to pay dues only to the international Mine-Mill office, not to the international auxiliary leadership, and declared that the funds would be held in escrow until the auxiliary problems were resolved.114 The executive board soon tried to revive the auxiliary, but the bitterness of these events debilitated the Montana auxiliaries.115
Grant County union women formed Ladies’ Auxiliary 209 in 1948, after the uprising in the international auxiliary was quelled, and anti-communism does not seem to have figured at all in its internal politics. Instead we find that auxiliary activity was a source of women’s class consciousness, which ultimately gave them the confidence to propose that women take over the pickets and the strength to defend the proposal. It is not immediately apparent that ladies’ auxiliaries would foster class consciousness, given that they did not take up workplace concerns, much less confront management directly. They were, instead, often the engine of endless rounds of potluck suppers and bingo games, as one recording secretary indicated by adding “bingo ÷ bingo = bingo” to meeting minutes in 1949.116 But their distance from the workplace, both in terms of activity and relation to management, should not blind us to their possible role in class formation.
In the United States and Canada, most union auxiliaries were formed in the midst of crisis, usually a strike during which women shouldered the burden of providing food, clothes, cash, and morale to strikers’ families. Demonstrations, pickets, parades, medical assistance, visits to the homes of strikers and strikebreakers, and lecture tours rounded out auxiliary strike activities. Auxiliaries also typically promoted the union label (particularly among AFL auxiliaries), pushed for public relief, worked for prolabor figures in local politics and civic organizations, and generally spread the union gospel as far as possible. That there were endless rounds of potlucks is not too far from the truth, since most auxiliaries faced the decidedly unglamorous task of raising money through bake sales, lotteries, and socials.
What did such activities mean for women? One way to understand them is to place them along axes that stretch from the “domestic” to the “social” and then to the “political,” or from the “traditional” to the “non-traditional.” Traditional activities projected women’s domesticity onto the union community; they included organizing socials and dances, cooking, offering medical care to wounded strikers, and buying only union-made products and services. They were often associated with domestic life and, importantly, with what historian Patricia Yeghissian calls the “nagging wife syndrome”—the hostility of wives toward their husbands’ union, and especially toward strikes. Nontraditional, political activities, by contrast, could broaden women’s perspective and make women into staunch unionists; these activities included demonstrating, speaking in public, picketing, and joining political campaigns. Many historians have found women following a trajectory from the social to the political, often through the course of a strike. Women in the 1937 Flint sit-down strike auxiliary, for example, started out staffing the kitchens and moved on to perform in the Living Newspaper, a Works Progress Administration theater project. Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse observed that women started out helping their husbands but ended up discovering themselves and developing a social awareness.117 Arizona women in the 1983 Phelps-Dodge strike contrasted their work in the 1980s with that of earlier auxiliaries: they believed it was now more “political.”118 Thus in this configuration, women developed class consciousness by moving beyond the domestic. Of course, as the example of the international Mine-Mill auxiliary shows, a movement into the “political”—in this instance, into the conflict over communism—could embroil an auxiliary in conflicts with the male-led union.
In explaining women’s class consciousness, many historians have been perhaps too quick to speak in terms of a public/private dichotomy, even to the point of assuming the concrete existence of separate spheres.119 Often, though, the boundaries were permeable. Women in Kansas mining towns of the 1920s, for instance, would shame their husbands publicly by refusing to bring lunch (a domestic task) to the mine.120 Auxiliaries occupied a contradictory position: they were based on women’s secondary, “helpmeet” role, but once women acted at all they were thrust into the public sphere, which in turn altered domestic relations.121
A second way to understand women’s developing class consciousness is to root it in the domestic realm itself, either because women’s household conditions fostered a class perspective on the world or because the domestic realm extended beyond the immediate household and into the community. Women food rioters in Barcelona around the turn of the century, for example, acted collectively and defiantly because high prices prevented them from meeting their families’ needs; their riots were not based on a feminist consciousness that questioned the sexual division of labor but rather on a “female consciousness” that strenuously upheld it.122 In the 1970s, one Kentucky coal miner’s wife declared, “Ain’t no man gonna take my husband’s job and git away with it!”123 Like the Barcelona food rioters, this woman, acting through the union auxiliary, struggled to stave off a direct and personal threat to her own well-being, dignity, and survival. Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, early in the twentieth century moved in and out of the paid workforce, but they always kept close family and community ties to the local textile mills. Their domestic world extended beyond their individual houses and into the streets of their neighborhoods. And out of the networks that women formed with their neighbors, out of the “material reality of everyday life,” came their unprecedented support for the textile strikes in 1912 and after.124
Related to this interpretation is a third, in which women develop class consciousness out of their own experiences as working-class household laborers. Coal miners’ wives in Ludlow, Colorado, supported their husbands’ 1913 strike because they had direct experience of the company’s abuse of power. They lived in a company town, in which the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company owned or otherwise controlled the houses, the stores, the schools, and the churches, and it was hard work to raise children, clean houses, and budget food in such a setting.125 Similarly, a defense of their own interests pushed Canadian women to join auxiliaries of the International Association of Machinists early in the twentieth century.126
Tracing the progression from domestic to political action does help explain the activities of the ladies’ auxiliary in Grant County, though theirs were without the conflicts over communism experienced by the Montana local auxiliaries. Auxiliary 209, like the union as a whole, did not single-mindedly wage class struggle. It frequently confined itself instead to the stuff of ladies’ auxiliary legend: potlucks and bingo, or social activities that seemed an extension of women’s domestic life. The mathematical discovery that “bingo ÷ bingo = bingo” points both to the tedium inherent in much auxiliary work and to one anonymous woman’s impatience with it. Enchilada suppers, dances, bingo, and socials were all part of women’s work to raise money for the union. Women brought food to picket lines, registered voters, lobbied against school segregation, and lobbied the state government regarding unemployment, thus matching the “political” side of the auxiliary coin too.
But equally important is to consider what women’s participation—and, more broadly, gender—meant for the union’s activism, for the range of issues that the union believed it should address. From this angle, we can see two important markers regarding gender in the union. The first is the degree to which women joined a union movement in an industry that almost exclusively employed men. Women’s participation in Local 890’s activities—whatever the source or goals of those activities—can thus be understood as one gauge of the union’s critique of existing power relations and its breadth of political vision. For if women were involved, then the union perceived the need for action beyond the mines, mills, and smelters, into which hardly any women entered. The second marker regarding gender is the degree to which power relations between men and women concerned the union. Some of the most stirring moments in Salt of the Earth—and, importantly, some of the most comic—are when people throw precisely those power relations into question. But the union as a whole did not concern itself with relations between men and women before the Empire Zinc strike.
When the Empire Zinc strike began in 1950, women and men were keenly aware of the threat to their union. True, the Korean War made employment more secure, but mining companies still enjoyed anticommunist weapons that a hot war against communism would only make more powerful. Within the first month of the Empire Zinc strike, the ladies’ auxiliary unobtrusively began to support the strikers. Wives and sisters of Local 890 members served on all of the strike committees save the negotiating committee. With the auxiliary’s help, the local sponsored a Christmas benefit and then a “Jamaica” party, or carnival, complete with the coronation of township queen, in February.
For the first eight months, then, women’s work looked very much like the “traditional” or “domestic” activities of many auxiliaries. But the seemingly trivial nature of these activities should not obscure the serious groundwork being laid for sustained, and difficult, organizing. The auxiliary integrated existing leadership, like Virginia Jencks, Virginia Chacón, and Clorinda Alderette, with newly active women like Braulia Velásquez, the wife of the negotiating committee’s chairman. Velásquez admitted that she “had never been an active woman in Union affairs up to the time the strike occurred.” “I had always been blind as to what my husband was doing in his Union affairs,” she said. “I first got a vague idea of what the Union meant when the Empire Zinc Company started discriminating against my husband in 1948.”127 Yet despite women’s own reasons for supporting the strike, and their participation in all facets of the strike except the picketing, union documents continued to identify women as secondary players at best. Publicity and internal union documents consistently referred to “strikers” and “striking brothers” rather than to “strikers’ families.” Men were still considered the workers on whom the strike centered. This would change during the summertime.
Using this first measure—the mere presence of women’s organization—we can see that some women were very committed to the union, and that, importantly, their commitment took an institutional, rather than haphazard or casual, form. But there is the second level on which to analyze women’s participation in Auxiliary 209. When Local 890 expanded its membership to include women, it did not thereby expand its mission to include addressing issues defined as “women’s” issues. In other words, inviting women to join union activities did not necessarily mean placing women’s issues within the union’s purview. Before the Empire Zinc strike, the class and community goals toward which the union and its auxiliary directed their energies did not question relations between men and women.
And there were certainly hints that all was not well on the domestic front. Cipriano Montoya, an 890 leader, was known to abuse his wife, Feliciana (Chana), but the union leadership—and the party leadership, for both Montoyas were in the party—did not broach the subject with him.128 Even if Cipriano Montoya’s abusive behavior interfered with his wife’s much-valued contributions to the union movement, people simply did not discuss such personal affairs.
There is room in comments like Clinton Jencks’s—“without women the union was organizing with one hand tied behind its back”—to imagine how untying that hand might also unleash a power struggle. For men, the family model was uncomplicated. While union men astutely refused to accept the company as a “family,” seeing it instead as an antagonist trying to mask its class interests with family rhetoric, they were in no position to consider the relations between men and women as anything other than naturally harmonious.
On many occasions in women’s history, feminist questions about the relative power of men and women, questions about women’s proper “place,” come up only after women have begun to participate in social movements that ostensibly had nothing to do with gender issues. Only in responding to male hostility did female antislavery activists, for instance, begin to develop principled arguments about women’s equality in the mid-nineteenth century. The Empire Zinc strike of 1950–52 would transform women’s participation from a defense of community into a challenge over domestic relations and, simultaneously, transform the very community that women had set out to defend. The rift between men and women was partially closed by the definitive vote at 2:30 in the morning. The family vision held sway; the unity that women and men achieved was imposed by one side winning out over the other. But events on the picket line and back at home would prove men correct in one sense: the natural order was threatened.