In this book, I have examined a set of unusual events as a lens onto American gender, ethnic, and class relations in the changing political climate of the mid-twentieth century. Confined as they are to a small region and short span of time, the Empire Zinc strike and the production of Salt of the Earth allow us to see the interplay of historical contingency, individual action, and larger historical dynamics. Grant County’s mining district was representative of the national mining economy in many ways; industrial mining, the masculine character of mine work, and the surge of labor activism in the 1930s and 1940s were national, as well as local, phenomena. But this mining district was not identical to other such places. Its patterns of settlement, demography, political economy, and the actions of individuals—John Sully and Daniel Jackling in the 1920s, Ysmael Moreno and Jack Kemp in the 1930s, Arturo Flores and the Jenckses in the 1940s, Elvira Molano and Tom Foy during the Empire Zinc strike, Michael Wilson and Sonja Dahl Biberman in the making of Salt of the Earth—all shaped events unique to Grant County. Micro-history allows a nuanced understanding of the texture of local society and of the relationship of local society to larger historical forces, but it also runs the risk of parochialism, that is, of remaining trapped by such a narrow scope as to leave us wondering if these events mattered for Grant County alone. If the history in this book is to affect how we think about other situations, it is important to generalize from the particularities and to follow some of the historical figures and institutions into later years.
A turning point in Salt of the Earth takes place in the Quinteros’ kitchen, with Ramón and Esperanza fighting over the “new way” that her strike activism seems to be charting for their family. For Esperanza, the new way is one of dignity; for Ramón, it is one of emasculation, her dignity apparently coming at his expense. Esperanza tries unsuccessfully to persuade him that her status at home resembles his at work. “The Anglo bosses look down on you,” she reminds him, “and you hate them for it. ‘Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican’—that’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, ‘Stay in your place’? Do you feel better having someone lower than you? . . . Whose neck shall I stand on, to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don’t want anything lower than I am.” When she insists that he cannot win the strike—or anything—without her, Ramón raises his arm to hit her. But Esperanza stands up to him. “That would be the old way,” she tells him. “Never try it on me again.” It is an astonishing scene, for rarely did movies of this era address domestic violence so directly and in an effort to promote gender equality. Ramón is neither let off the hook nor portrayed as a monster; instead, he is allowed to change in a way that affirms the dignity of men and women alike. The movie ends on a triumphant note, with the mining community pouring in from all directions to protect the Quintero family from eviction and Ramón finally accepting that, together, men and women could “push everything up with us as we go.” “Then I knew,” Esperanza reflects in a voice-over, “we had won something they could never take away—something I could leave to our children—and they, the salt of the earth, would inherit it.”1
The movie shows a fundamental transformation taking place in the relations of husbands to wives, a transformation made possible by a change of gender consciousness and by the success of the strike. The transformation is clear and unambiguous; the old way is distinguished from the new, and the new way is chosen. It is a transformation that will be sustained and enjoyed by the coming generations. The film’s portrayal of transformation, though, was itself an effort to settle and make permanent in a cultural artifact that which was far more volatile in real life. For the conflicts taking place in Grant County were not fully resolved—for individuals or families, or in terms of gender relations more broadly.
The depth and permanency of changes in union families’ gender relations varied from couple to couple. Some women found that the strike and the process of making the film changed their husbands’ behavior for the better or, if this were not the case, that they at least improved women’s self-confidence enough for them to strike out on their own. Henrietta Williams, for example, grew much closer to her husband, Braulio, as a result of the strike and movie.2 Mariana Ramírez and Anita Torrez both “felt that their marriages became more egalitarian partnerships.”3 Dolores Jiménez felt that she “grew ten feet tall” as a result of the strike, tall enough and strong enough to end her marriage to an abusive husband. She got her GED, went to beauty school, and opened her own salon—and she kept her ex-husband, Frank, from laying claim to any of her earnings. She regretted, however, that her divorce lawyer persuaded her that changing her name “wouldn’t be proper.”4
But some women, like Virginia Chacón, believed that men slipped too readily and too quickly back into the old ways. One wrenching story comes from the late 1950s, after Chana Montoya finally pulled away from an abusive marriage to Cipriano Montoya, a Kennecott employee and union activist. She divorced him in 1954, but they continued to live together off and on. In 1955, she moved to Los Angeles, where, with the help of Salt of the Earth technician Paul Perlin, she got a job in a Los Angeles hospital. When Cipriano went to Los Angeles to persuade her to return to New Mexico, she got a restraining order against him.5 The restraining order did not work. One morning in July 1961, he waited for her near a bus stop and then shot her four times with a rifle, killing her on the spot. She was thirty-three years old, the mother of seven children.
Montoya launched an unusual defense: he claimed he shot his ex-wife to protect his children from communism. “She was among the party’s cadre,” he explained. “She was not only trying to poison the world with filthy Communist propaganda, she was a threat to the future security of our seven children.”6 He accused her of joining the Communist Party in 1948 and then of leading him into it. “From that hour on,” he said, “we had a very sorrowful marriage.”7 Her participation in the Empire Zinc strike, which he attributed to a CP order, “made [him] angry.” “That was no job for a woman,” he asserted. Moreover, he claimed that authorities at a CP school at the San Cristóbal ranch in the mid-1950s accused him of “exercising undue ‘masculine control’ over his wife.”8 Montoya was convicted and imprisoned for his wife’s murder. Upon release he told Virginia and Juan Chacón that he had been forced to testify in that manner. Shortly after his release he committed suicide.
Obviously the Montoyas’ story is not typical. But its very extremity reveals some of what is at stake in attempting to change gender relations. The movie, by ending on a positive note, makes us want the changes we see on screen to be permanent, but the variety of actual couples’ experiences does not permit such a gratifying conclusion. Still, even though not all of the couples involved in the strike made permanent positive changes in gender relations, we can nonetheless appreciate the changes that some people made in gender consciousness.
Many of the picketing women had a profound change of consciousness, whether or not their marriages also changed. Several actively sought work outside the home, sometimes pursuing higher education to obtain it. In her late thirties, Aurora Chávez got her GED and then a teaching certificate and a master’s degree. After her husband died in the early 1960s, she moved to Douglas, Arizona (another southwestern mining town), where she taught in a bilingual program.9 Some men experienced a change in consciousness, too, “getting a lesson” from the women, as Local 890 official Angel Bustos reported to the Mine-Mill convention in 1953.10 A more poignant story comes from the granddaughter of Joe T. Morales. Late in his life, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Morales kept yelling at the hospital nurses to get back on the picket line: in his delusional state, he was back at the Empire Zinc picket.11 In 1951, Morales had been uncomfortable with women’s picketing, yet on some deep level the urgency and importance of their action impressed him. Finally, as the character Esperanza hoped, many children of union activists did inherit the dignity and compassion fostered by the union community, and they continued to work on behalf of social justice causes.
But while positive and powerful, the change of consciousness proved inadequate for sustaining activism in the ladies’ auxiliary. In fact, Auxiliary 209 disbanded only a few years after Salt of the Earth was made. These observations suggest that gender consciousness and gender relations do not change at the same rate or in sync with one another; a dramatic change in the former, in this case, was accompanied by a less dramatic change in the latter. A permanent change in the division of labor, combined with a stronger feminist movement, might have helped women maintain the advances they had made and even, perhaps, move further.12 Instead, we have the cultural artifact Salt of the Earth, which continues to resonate with audiences because it keeps us imagining a solidarity across gender, class, and ethnic lines.
The history of the Empire Zinc strike shows us how gender conflict can arise in the course of other conflicts—the unintended consequences of particular actions—while its origins lay in the larger social structure. Mine-Mill organizing in Grant County paid little heed to women or to gender issues, but its class- and ethnic-based mobilization was nonetheless gendered from the beginning: men created a brotherhood that challenged management from a position of masculine honor and strength, and women joined efforts to redress class and ethnic inequities, inequities understood to affect families, not just male workers. Women did not aim to change their marriages, but in encountering their husbands’ resistance in the charged atmosphere of the Empire Zinc strike, they demanded a reevaluation of the power relations between men and women.
The women’s picket took place because of a confluence of factors, some long-standing and others more transitory, that made the Empire Zinc strike matter so much in the first place and then permitted women to propose the picket, men to go along with it, and the company and law enforcement to be taken enough by surprise so as to upset the balance of power in this labor-management battle. The strike mattered so much to union families in Grant County because they saw it as a showdown between the collective power of management and the collective power of workers. It assumed the proportions that it did because over the previous three years mining companies had tried—and mostly failed—to defeat Local 890 by other means, often using anticommunism to try to persuade workers to abandon the red-tainted union. Workers were little disposed to do so, however, because the union they knew—and had built themselves—was democratic and worked hard on their behalf. Because the stakes were so high, and because they had come to see their families’ well-being tied up with that of the union, women stepped forward with their ambitious proposal to defend Local 890’s picket.
In the story of the women’s picket, we see how human agency takes the potential inherent in a given confluence of events and realizes that potential, in this case by women’s dramatic and transformative confrontations with husbands and law enforcement. The women picketers not only prevailed against their husbands and Empire Zinc but also attracted artists who were equipped to help union families make their story into a movie, and thereby to amplify the victory far beyond the boundaries of Grant County. As an explanatory model, a “showdown” like that between Local 890 and the Empire Zinc Company operates according to a clear narrative progression of crescendo, climax, and denouement. The denouement includes only those elements either explicitly or implicitly present in what preceded it; the showdown model is, in this respect, something of a closed system. By contrast, a “confluence of events” is inherently unstable and ambiguous, as new factors come into play and others recede. Both historical models are at work in the story of the women’s picket and movie production, but only the former is at work in the cinematic rendition of the story. And it is the latter we must consider in gauging the long-term changes wrought by the strike and the movie production.
The Empire Zinc strike was important in confirming Mine-Mill as a powerful presence in Grant County. It held tremendous symbolic value throughout the mining Southwest, and both this symbolic value and the actual work Mine-Mill continued to do in this region challenged the dual-wage system and segregation more broadly. Mexican Americans continued to enter jobs from which they had been excluded, and they continued to use their union as a base from which to influence local politics. In turn, the strength of Mine-Mill locals in the Southwest (along with those in Montana, the original core of the Western Federation of Miners and then of Mine-Mill) helped the union withstand fifteen years of assault by the federal government, the U.S. Steelworkers, and others bent on stifling this left-wing union. Prosecutions for falsifying noncommunist affidavits and efforts to classify the union as an agent of a foreign government all foundered in the legal system because Mine-Mill was able, ultimately, to win on appeals. Mine-Mill’s victories were hollow, however, for Mine-Mill’s resources were drained by the endless legal battles until the union was forced to merge with the Steelworkers, its rival, in 1967.13 Mine-Mill Local 890 became Steelworkers Local 890.
And other factors were at play in the local political economy. Corporate paternalism was on the wane, not just because of worker protest but also because of market forces and national trends. In 1955, Kennecott Copper Corporation sold off its company towns, including Santa Rita and Hurley. An Ohio real estate company bought the property and sold the lots to individuals, giving first choice to residents. Kennecott had lost a 1954 discrimination suit brought by Tommy Higgins, a Mexican American employee who had tried to rent a house in Anglo-dominated Hurley rather than in North Hurley, where most Mexican Americans lived. The suit may have played some role in the corporation’s decision to get out of the business of providing housing and other services—and the business of maintaining segregation.14
Still other forces tempered the achievements of Grant County miners, most notably the collapse of the lead-zinc market in 1953. Absent government intervention, nothing—even an alliance with the mining companies that were usually the union’s antagonists—could protect miners from the ravages of the international metals market.15 So while the 1952 victory over Empire Zinc strengthened Local 890, the workers themselves had little opportunity to enjoy that victory. Empire Zinc and Asarco both shut down for a few years, and many union families had to move away.
Kennecott continued production until it sold its Santa Rita and Hurley operations to Phelps-Dodge (PD) in the mid-1980s. PD had just defeated the Steelworkers in Clifton-Morenci, Arizona, another Mine-Mill stronghold of Mexican American miners, in a strike that was another turning point in American labor relations: PD’s victory effectively destroyed pattern bargaining in national industries.16 (The only pattern bargaining that remained was in the form of union concessions to increasingly aggressive corporations.) Having succeeded in decertifying the Steelworkers in Clifton-Morenci, PD kept up the pressure on Local 890 but failed, ultimately, to decertify it.17 But while the union has hung on, it has not been strong, and its members have enjoyed little job security in the face of plant closings and partial reopenings as the region undergoes the same deindustrialization that characterizes so much of contemporary America. From year to year, PD’s Grant County workforce contracts or expands by hundreds of workers, fluctuating with the vagaries of the metals market and the operations at PD’s other mines. Recently, Chino has been operating at full force, but the smelter at Hurley is unlikely to reopen.18
The blacklisted artists’ story was similarly bittersweet. Rosaura Revueltas was blacklisted in her native Mexico and never made another film. The Jarricos and Wilsons moved to France in the mid-1950s and continued to work on film projects in exile. Herbert Biberman remained in the United States and in the 1960s directed Slaves, an ambitious but unsuccessful film. He wrote a memoir of making Salt of the Earth in 1965, just before the movie began to resurface and circulate on college campuses as part of the Chicano and feminist movements. Members of Independent Productions Corporation launched an antitrust suit against Hollywood studios and individuals like Roy Brewer for conspiracy to destroy Salt of the Earth, but their efforts finally failed in the mid-1960s. IPC was slightly more successful in distributing the movie abroad, where it won several prestigious awards, but only in the European and Asian countries that were not dominated by Hollywood. Even with these showings, IPC never recouped its costs. IPC went bankrupt and could make no more pictures, and that road to a more democratic popular culture was blocked.
It is important to see how, in making Salt of the Earth, blacklisted artists managed to “hide in plain sight”: they produced motion pictures and television shows that projected humanist values despite their opponents’ strenuous efforts to enforce the blacklist.19 But that perspective must encompass the overall picture of repression. The costs of anticommunism have been very high for individuals, who lost friendships, livelihoods, and reputations; for the film industry, which lost a vibrant alternative popular culture; for the labor movement, which lost a generation of committed organizers and a critical perspective on the American political economy; and for social justice causes of all sorts. Anticommunists operated, in part, by ferreting out people’s membership, or alleged membership, in progressive organizations and forcing supposed communists to participate in public acts of renunciation. One defense against the witch hunt has been the principled refusal to answer the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” This understandable defensive posture has had the unfortunate consequence of keeping the history of the American Left in a shadow that is lifting only little by little.
The story of Mine-Mill in Grant County can tell us much about left-wing unionism and its importance to Mexican Americans. Mine-Mill offered Mexican American workers a powerful class analysis that took serious account of racism and its expression in class relations at the workplace and in claims to citizenship in local society. Labor rights and civil rights are intimately connected to one another, and, in the 1940s, left-wing unions like Mine-Mill recognized this connection and by doing so helped secure these rights for Mexican Americans. Mine-Mill matched its rhetoric with forceful, effective action and the fostering of local leadership, which inoculated most Mexican American workers against the anticommunism that surged around them in the late 1940s. The Left that those workers knew was a positive force in their lives, quite at odds with the terrible specter that anticommunists conjured up.
Progressive unionism like that in Grant County owed much to, but was not coterminous with, the Communist Party. This basic fact was lost on anticommunists, to whom communism meant one thing, and anything close to the CP was by definition defiled and perverted by it. But anticommunists in Grant County were correct in identifying a CP presence and sensing in it a threat to the social order. The thrust of CP-inspired activism was different from what anticommunists imagined—Mine-Mill Local 890 threatened the class and racial order, not the functioning of democratic government—but it was no less a threat.
This disjuncture points us to another aspect of this story that may have broader significance: communism and anticommunism do not belong to the same analytical category. There is a relationship between them, one cemented by language (the prefix “anti” links the two), but it is not a simple relationship. Communism in the labor movement meant a Marxist class analysis and vision of the future, community with others who shared that analysis and vision, and organizations that were in some places rigidly hierarchical and in others, like Grant County, much more democratically run. Anticommunism was a defensive response to the perceived threat of communism, but it came to operate as a discourse in American society, a discourse manifest in powerful institutions like the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Hollywood blacklist, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It was a discourse that people employed to express other kinds of conflicts and thereby to take the higher moral ground accorded to anticommunism. Local class, racial, and, in the case of Chana and Cipriano Montoya, gender antagonisms all found expression in anticommunist rhetoric fueled by national efforts to suppress progressive unionism and cultural alternatives like Salt of the Earth. Anticommunism lent itself to opportunism, because it was sacrosanct: anything done in the name of anticommunism was unassailable. Cipriano Montoya took this view to its logical, if tragically absurd, conclusion when he tried to get away with the murder of his wife by saying he killed her to protect his children against communism.
The story of the strike and the movie illuminates a tumultuous period in the history of mid-twentieth century America. It fuses, in a clear and compelling fashion, the themes of class, ethnic, and gender conflict and struggles for solidarity. It embodies the connections between local and national historical trends: the workings of anticommunism, early efforts at Chicano civil rights, and the trajectory of the American labor movement. And it shows how important it was for workers to reenact their experiences in an artistic form. Unique among feature films of the 1950s, Salt of the Earth relied on a collaboration of workers and artists; also unique among feature films, it was the subject of intense political and economic repression, but ultimately deemed by the U.S. Library of Congress one of a hundred films it is committed to preserving above all others.
Sensing these rich layers of historical meaning, artists, scholars, and activists have repeatedly returned to the Empire Zinc strike and Salt of the Earth as important tools in union campaigns, feminist consciousness-raising efforts, and the Chicano movement, as well as the subject of conferences, scholarship, documentary films, feature films, and even an opera.20 All have been inspired by the combination of the story and the remarkable circumstances in which the story was then told, suppressed, and ultimately revived.
The legacy of the strike and movie production has been more ambiguous for Grant County’s residents, however. As in many other labor conflicts, the people involved were forced to take sides and then to live, often for decades, with the ramifications of their choices. Powerful feelings of solidarity and betrayal alike have animated the people of Grant County ever since. The union’s supporters, often the children of the 1950s activists, have also been saddened by the recent decline of the union, the sapping of its vitality at the very moment when the community is left with the environmental devastation of a century of mining and seventy-five years of smelting.
For this reason, some Grant County residents have recently worked on the remaking of Salt of the Earth. The way in which that iconic film might be remade, however, has not been determined, and the project may never be realized. True to the spirit of the original, this project relies on a close collaboration between filmmakers and Grant County residents. But, unlike the first, it must also take into account the existence of a complete script from fifty years ago. For some people involved in the project, this is the chance to film Michael Wilson’s script with the resources it deserved but never received, in order to achieve higher production values and widespread distribution through a Hollywood studio. For others, the spirit of Salt of the Earth requires that the new movie not simply reshoot the same scenes with new actors but rather address current community issues—such as environmental reclamation or protecting the Kneeling Nun rock formation on the mountain behind Chino’s open pit, a geological feature that has special meaning for Grant Countians. A new production committee has brought together the perspectives of Hollywood producer Moctezuma Esparza, writer-director David Riker, Michael Wilson’s heirs, and Grant County residents. Just as the union families struggled to represent their story as they understood it, so too are today’s Grant County families struggling to honor the accomplishments of their parents and grandparents and to revive a community spirit that can meet the challenges of a new century.