1. Collar-to-collar pay, also known as “portal-to-portal” pay, would compensate workers for the time spent traveling to the work site within the mine. The union’s other demands were helpers for miners, preventing foremen from performing productive work, the deletion of a no-strike clause, and an end to a thirty-day trial period for new workers.
2. SCDP, October 17, 1950.
3. See Lorence, Suppression of “Salt of the Earth,” for a full account of this opposition.
4. For the script, see Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth.
5. Prominent among them were the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (later the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America) in California, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas; the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union in California; and the National Miners Union and the Liga Obrera de Habla Española, both active in New Mexico. This labor organizing took place in agriculture, manufacturing, warehousing, and many other industries. See Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture, 80–114 and 164–99; Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 62–157; Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold; Daniel, Bitter Harvest; Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History, 87–107; and Healey and Isserman, California Red.
6. For more on the southwestern organizing drive, see Dinwiddie, “Rise of the Mine-Mill Union.” Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 159–74, and Mario T. García, Mexican Americans, 175–98, focus on organizing in El Paso’s smelters.
7. Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, and Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, make this argument.
8. For information on the Congreso, see García, Mexican Americans, 145–74; Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 110–16; Ruiz, “Una Mujer Sin Fronteras”; and Larralde and Griswold del Castillo, “Luisa Moreno.” For LULAC, see Márquez, LULAC; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Mario T. García, Mexican Americans; Orozco, “Regionalism, Politics, and Gender”; Orozco, “Origins of the League of United Latin American Citizens”; and Garza, “LULAC.”
9. On the conservative end of the political spectrum, the American G.I. Forum was formed to secure rights for Mexican Americans while affirming a patriotism that increasingly became anticommunist in the 1950s; further to the left was the American Veterans Committee, which was not limited to any one ethnic group but fought for veterans’ benefits—in housing, health, education, and work—that would not be restricted to white people. For the American G.I. Forum, see Allsup, American G.I. Forum, and Ramos, American G.I. Forum. For the American Veterans Committee, see Bolte, New Veteran; Moore, “Search for Alternatives”; Saxe, “‘Citizens First,’”—; Severo and Milford, Wages of War; and Tyler, “American Veterans Committee.”
10. Here I am drawing especially on the work of Horace Huntley and Robin Kelley, who have both studied Mine-Mill among African Americans in Alabama. Huntley uses a violent jurisdictional battle between Mine-Mill and the United Steelworkers in 1948 to evaluate Mine-Mill’s record on race and racism. He finds that the union’s formal commitment to racial equality distinguished Mine-Mill from many southern unions, and that the anticommunism unleashed in the late 1940s—which took the form of raids by the United Steelworkers, sanctioned by the CIO—set back the cause of interracial unionism. See Huntley’s dissertation, “Iron Ore Miners and Mine-Mill”; for an abbreviated version, see his article, “Red Scare and Black Workers in Alabama.” Kelley is more critical of the CP. He, too, finds a commitment to racial equality and, importantly, an active effort to mesh southern African American cultural practices with Communist ones. He shows that the CP was not monolithic in structure or ideology; local conditions and history mattered, and African Americans used the party more than the party used them. But Kelley finds that the shift from the ultra-left Third Period to the Popular Front—a shift that many historians have applauded as sanctioning indigenous radicalism—hurt the cause of African American self-determination. The Popular Front relaxed the party strictures against “white chauvinism,” at least in Alabama, and Mine-Mill’s interracialism had the effect of sanctioning white racism. See Kelley, Hammer and Hoe.
Huntley and Kelley belong to a revisionist school of historians examining the CP. By focusing on its workings in particular locales and around union organizing and racial equality, they diverge from the path marked out by Theodore Draper in the 1950s and since followed by historians such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes. In this interpretation, the American CP was little more than a puppet of the Soviet Union; riven by factionalism and dominated by immigrants, the CP lacked authentic connection to the United States and, instead, threatened American institutions. See Theodore Draper, Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia; Klehr, Heyday of American Communism; and Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, Soviet World of American Communism. Vernon Jensen, who wrote important histories of Mine-Mill and its predecessor, the Western Federation of Miners, similarly dissects every policy shift in the 1930s to show the creeping influence of Communists and their sometimes violent clashes with moderates, who realized their peril only too late. See Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism.
11. Heidi Hartmann first developed this thesis in “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex.”
12. The historical literature is rich in these themes. See Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action”; Kessler-Harris, “Treating the Male as ‘Other’”—; Gordon, “What’s New in Women’s History”; essays in Baron, ed., Work Engendered; Jameson, All That Glitters and “Imperfect Unions”; Mercier, Anaconda; Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle; Taillon, “‘What We Want Is Good, Sober Men’”—; Glickman, Living Wage; Lindsay, “Domesticity and Difference”; Yarrow, “Gender-Specific Consciousness”; Peck, Reinventing Free Labor; Penfold, “‘Have You No Manhood in You?’”—; and Finn, Tracing the Veins.
13. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family.
14. Boydston, Home and Work.
15. In Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, the first full-length book on Chicana labor history, Vicki L. Ruiz shows how cannery workers negotiated family responsibilities as they created a gender-specific work culture, a theme that anthropologist Patricia Zavella develops in her study of contemporary cannery workers, Women’s Work and Chicano Families. Roslinda M. González offers a structural overview of Chicana family life and employment in “Chicanas and Mexican Immigrant Families.” “Las Obreras: The Politics of Work and Family” was the theme of a special issue of Aztlán in 1991, featuring articles by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. This collection of essays was republished in 2000 as a book, Las Obreras, edited by Vicki L. Ruiz. Sociologist Beatríz M. Pesquera finds that the contemporary division of household labor—and Chicanas’ expectations of their husbands’ household duties—varies noticeably by social class. See Pesquera, “‘In the Beginning He Wouldn’t Lift Even a Spoon.’”—Margaret Rose organizes her study of women in the United Farm Workers around the figures of Dolores Huerta, who represented an independent woman activist—albeit one with many family commitments—and Helen Chávez, who represented what Rose considers a more traditional integration of family, union, and work. See articles by Rose, “Traditional and Nontraditional Patterns of Female Activism” and “From the Fields to the Picket Line,” and her dissertation, “Women in the United Farm Workers.”
16. Jameson, All That Glitters; Klubock, Contested Communities; Peck, Reinventing Free Labor; Finn, Tracing the Veins; Mercier, Anaconda; Yarrow, “Gender-Specific Consciousness”; Penfold, “‘Have You No Manhood in You?’”—; Guérin-Gonzales, “From Ludlow to Camp Solidarity.”
17. See especially Jameson, All That Glitters; Finn, Tracing the Veins; Mercier, Anaconda; Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle; Guérin-Gonzales, “From Ludlow to Camp Solidarity”; and Steedman, “Godless Communists and Faithless Wives.”
18. See Jameson, All That Glitters; Mellinger, Race and Labor in Western Copper; Huginnie, “‘Strikitos’”—; Baker, “Women in the Ludlow Strike”; Peck, Reinventing Free Labor; O’Neill, “Domesticity Deployed”; Gordon, Great Arizona Orphan Abduction; Byrkit, “Walter Douglas and Labor Struggles”; and Dubofsky, We Shall Be All.
19. I have chosen not to use the term “machismo,” because it tends to flatten the range of masculinities into a stereotype of Mexican men.
20. As Cynthia E. Orozco has shown, feminists, especially women in subordinated ethnic groups, were not necessarily part of national women’s organizations. An important example is Alice Dickerson Montemayor, a LULAC leader from Laredo, Texas, who criticized male leaders for their sexism. See Orozco, “Alice Dickerson Montemayor.”
21. A very few historians have studied the CP from a feminist angle, investigating women’s roles in the party and in left-wing organizations, how the party did and did not promote women’s rights, and notions of gender implicit in party rhetoric and action. In general, these historians show the subordination of women’s issues in an organization that saw class struggle as the principal force in history. Looking at the decade of the 1930s, Robert Schaffer argues that the party’s structure permitted women’s participation but that the absence of autonomous women’s groups kept women’s issues in the background. Buttressing this tendency were CP press images of women as militant strikers, beauty queens, and keepers of the family flame. Rosalyn Baxandall, surveying CP history over several decades, finds that the party’s formal commitment to gender equality opened the way for women to criticize male authority. But, like Schaffer, she concludes that the party treated women’s issues as subordinate matters that did not merit diversion of attention or resources from the class struggle. Women’s liberation would follow class liberation, and to organize around women’s oppression was not only a waste of time but, even more, a betrayal of working-class women in favor of “bourgeois” feminism. Clearly the party itself was only a limited vehicle for women’s participation and for changes in gender relations, but Linn Shapiro and Kate Weigand have found a different situation in the “front” organizations of the late 1940s. At some distance from the party, but still influenced by its worldview, activism in organizations like the Congress of American Women began to take Communist women in new theoretical directions. Moreover, as Baxandall suggests, informal discussions of the Woman Question were important in changing the consciousness of some Communist women and men. This book takes off from the insights gained from this recent work. Instead of concentrating on the party itself, however, I am more interested in the ways that women who were associated with a left-wing union—although probably not Communists themselves—made use of left-wing feminism. See Schaffer, “Women and the Communist Party USA”; Baxandall, “Question Seldom Asked”; Shapiro, “Red Feminism”; Weigand, “Vanguards of Women’s Liberation”; and Weigand, Red Feminism.
22. A useful starting point for this literature is Alma M. García, “Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse,” and Alma M. García, ed., Chicana Feminist Thought.
23. See Rose, “Gender and Civic Activism,” 179, and Ruiz, “Claiming Public Space,” 24. Irene Ledesma (“Texas Newspapers and Chicana Workers’ Activism,” 322–27) finds, by contrast, that maternalist representations of Chicana strikers limited strikers’ power in that era. For the 1970s, Mary Pardo (“Creating Community” and Mexican American Women Activists) argues that a maternalism rooted in neighborhoods and ethnicity empowered the “Mothers of East L.A.” These scholars are engaged in a larger debate about “political familism,” or the theory, articulated most clearly by Maxine Baca Zinn in the 1970s, that Chicanas’ political activism has been rooted in family ideology. Cynthia Orozco cautions against applying this theory uncritically to Chicana history. See Zinn, “Political Familism,” and Orozco, “Beyond Machismo,” 7–8.
24. For a fascinating study of a different cross-ethnic cultural collaboration—the “Mexican Players” and the San Gabriel Valley’s Padua Hills Theater, which evolved from an Americanization program into an effort to combat Anglo prejudice—see Matt Garcia, World of Its Own, 121–54, and “‘Just Put on That Padua Hills Smile.’”
25. On the complicated issue of labels, see Bean and Bradshaw, “Intermarriage Between Persons of Spanish and Non-Spanish Surname”; Hernández, Estrada, and Alvírez, “Census Data”; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; and Rodríguez, Changing Race.
26. Fields, “Ideology and Slavery.”
27. See Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Griswold del Castillo, Los Angeles Barrio; and Kaminsky, “Gender, Race, Raza.”
28. Cooper, “‘Our Strike,’”–81.
1. Lasky, Geology and Ore Deposits, 69; Hernon and Jones, “Ore Deposits of the Central Mining District,” 1222–23, 1228–33; Clemons, Christiansen, and James, Southwestern New Mexico, 68; Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, 340–43.
2. Clemons, Christiansen, and James, Southwestern New Mexico, 68. “Ore” is made up of both useful and useless mineral, the latter referred to as “gangue.”
3. Hernon and Jones, “Ore Deposits of the Central Mining District,” 1220–22; Clemons, Christiansen, and James, Southwestern New Mexico, 69.
4. Hernon and Jones, “Ore Deposits of the Central Mining District,” 1216–20; Finlay, Report of Appraisal, 55.
5. Milbauer, “Historical Geography of the Silver City Mining Region,” 28.
6. Ibid., 52.
7. Boyer and Gayton describe the lives of women in this part of the world in Apache Mothers and Daughters.
8. Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, 206; John P. Wilson, Historical Profile of Southwestern New Mexico, 9.
9. Mack Turner, “Mining Industry Writes 150 Years of History from Primitive Workings to Open Pit Projects,” SCDP, December 13, 1954; Sinclair, “Town That Vanished into Thin Air,” 2–3. McWilliams, North from Mexico, 135, dates Carrasco’s discovery as 1800.
10. John P. Wilson, Historical Profile of Southwestern New Mexico, 9.
11. McGaw, Savage Scene, 76; Albert H. Vigil, interview by author.
12. And unlike in other areas of the Southwest, including Grant County, Hispanics of northern New Mexico later became important in territorial and then in state politics. See Gómez-Quiñones, Roots of Chicano Politics, 257–62, for territorial politics, and 328–33 for the Hijos del País movement, which asserted Hispanic political power in the years following statehood in 1912.
13. Historical geographer D. W. Meinig succinctly describes these regional economic, demographic, and cultural patterns in Southwest. The eastern New Mexican highlands were also settled later than northern and central New Mexico, remaining under Comanche control until Mexicans and Texans started ranching there in the nineteenth century. Known as “Little Texas,” this district resembled the Texas Panhandle geographically and culturally. Grant County differed from Little Texas in that its metal mines ensured that ranching never dominated the local economy.
14. John P. Wilson, Historical Profile of Southwestern New Mexico, 10; Humble, “Grant County, New Mexico.”
15. John P. Wilson, Historical Profile of Southwestern New Mexico, 10.
16. Ibid.
17. Kirker’s biographer casts Santa Rita’s ownership in some doubt. At first Don Francisco’s wife continued to run the mine and to lease it to other Mexicans and Americans. But the Mexican government restricted landownership by gachupines, or Spanish-born Mexicans such as Don Francisco. See McGaw, Savage Scene.
18. McGaw, Savage Scene.
19. Sinclair, “Town That Vanished into Thin Air,” 3.
20. J. H. Lyman, cited in Indian Affairs Report (1871), cited in Twitchell, ed. and comp., Leading Facts of New Mexican History, 252 n. 104.
21. Sinclair, “Town That Vanished into Thin Air,” 5.
22. Milbauer, “Historical Geography of the Silver City Mining Region,” 64. Henkel’s smelter used Mexican and German technology.
23. Sweeney, Mangas Coloradas. An abbreviated account can be found in Sweeney, “Mangas Coloradas and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Conflicts.”
24. Debo, History of the Indians of the United States, 267–83. The Chiricahua who eventually surrendered, including Geronimo and other leaders, were shipped to Fort Marion, Florida, by train, and then to Mobile, Alabama, and Fort Sill, Oklahoma, before being finally settled back in New Mexico on the Mescalero Apache reservation near Tularosa.
25. See, for example, obituaries in Silver City Daily Press of Mrs. Patrocinio D. Acevedo, August 6, 1948; Pánfilo H. Becerra, September 10, 1943; Margarita Cordova, September 20, 1943; Mrs. Ysidora Y. Fletcher, July 10, 1954; Francisco Grijalva, February 13, 1934; José Guerra, February 24, 1942; Trinidad Ponca Hernández, January 8, 1948; Domitila Morales, March 29, 1939; Annie Madrid Ogás, April 4, 1944; Urbana Lucero Ramírez, December 24, 1947; Luz Telles Tarín, December 24, 1944; Paulina Torres, August 13, 1949; and Josefa S. Trujillo, October 10, 1948. Many were from the Mimbres Valley, and a few were identified as miners or railroad workers. A number of equally longtime residents were not identified as pioneers, but I have not found differences in the two sets to account for the discrepancy. Into eastern New Mexico, too, came both Mexicans and Texans at this time, but their movements were always in the context of Texan imperial ambitions that treated Mexicans shabbily at best, violently at worst.
26. See Weinberg, Manifest Destiny. Juan Gómez-Quiñones explains further that partisan politics also delayed statehood, as Democrats who dominated what would become Arizona did not want to be subjected to the Republicans who dominated New Mexico. See Gómez-Quiñones, Roots of Chicano Politics, 325.
27. Joe T. Morales, interview by author.
28. On the San Pedro Valley, see Benton, “What About Women in the White Man’s Camp?,” for a superb analysis of racial formation in the context of distinct social and economic districts.
29. Darlis A. Miller, “Cross-Cultural Marriages,” 100.
30. Deena J. González, Refusing the Favor, 72, 113–16. González finds that Spanish Mexican women who married Euro-Americans around the time of the U.S. conquest of Santa Fe ran into trouble as widows: unscrupulous Euro-Americans increasingly used the courts to defraud them of inheritance and, occasionally, to contest child custody. See ibid., 91–92. Looking at central Arizona mining towns in the 1860s, Johnson, in “Sharing Bed and Board,” shows the very different cultural expectations brought by Mexicans and Anglos to cohabitation—whether among Mexicans, among Anglos, or between Mexicans and Anglos. Her emphasis on the flux of boomtowns makes for a good comparison with similarly booming Silver City but less so with the Mimbres Valley.
31. This is untrue of Asians. There were a few Japanese and Chinese in Grant County, and, as other historians have shown, the Chinese ranked below even Mexicans in the mining industry. See especially Johnson, Roaring Camp. By the 1940s, however, the few Chinese families were fairly well established as grocers.
32. Hyde, Copper for America, 82.
33. O. M. Bishop and R. L. Mentch, “Zinc,” in U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, Mineral Facts and Problems, 979.
34. The New Jersey Zinc Company, First Hundred Years; Bishop and Mentch, “Zinc,” 979. The United States imported most of its zinc until the 1890s.
35. Elliott et al., International Control in the Non-Ferrous Metals, 766. Finlay, Report of Appraisal, 59, classifies the other lead-zinc operations in Grant County as “Small Metal Mines of Doubtful Value.” The lead-zinc industry spread from New Jersey and Pennsylvania into Wisconsin, Illinois, and what would become known as the Tri-State region, the corner where Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma meet.
36. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census, “New Mexico,” table 3. The 1920 census did not break down data by county, but other sources confirm that most metal mines were located in Grant County. I take the state figures as a reasonable approximation of Grant County’s figures.
37. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, 1930, Mines and Quarries, 1929, “Gold, Silver, Copper, Lead, and Zinc,” table 7. A single enterprise could cover more than one mine.
38. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census, table 3.
39. Coan, History of New Mexico, 2:365; Davis, ed., Historical Encyclopedia of New Mexico, 556.
40. See Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, for the definitive history of this class of men.
41. The demand diminished in the 1910s, when the Mexican Revolution drove many engineers back to the United States and the mining schools turned out more graduates than the market could support. See ibid., 294–96.
42. Coan, History of New Mexico, 2:365.
43. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 66.
44. SCDP, October 21, 1938, section C, Progress Edition, 10.
45. Ibid.
46. Sinclair, “Town That Vanished into Thin Air,” 6.
47. Turner, “Mining Industry Writes 150 Years of History”; Himes, “General Managers at Chino,” 1; John Murchison Sully obituary, n.p., July 18, 1933, in Silver City Public Library vertical file, “Santa Rita.”
48. Parsons, Porphyry Coppers, 210.
49. Hyde, Copper for America, 129.
50. Rickard, Interviews with Mining Engineers, 194–96.
51. Jameson, All That Glitters, 24–25.
52. Twitchell, Leading Facts of New Mexican History, 270; Hyde, Copper for America, 140–41.
53. Hurley was named after J. E. Hurley, general manager of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. See Pearce, ed., New Mexico Place Names, s.v.
54. This accounts, too, for how American and British companies were able to take over mining operations in copper-rich but capital-poor regions like Chile and Mexico. The Chilean owners of El Teniente mine in central Chile, for example, could not afford to invest in the transportation, housing, and processing that would make mining its inaccessible and low-grade ores profitable. They sold it to a company financed by the Guggenheims, who “merged their U.S. and Chilean mines [into] Kennecott Copper Company” in 1915. Kennecott would eventually purchase Chino, too. See Klubock, Contested Communities, 24–27.
55. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Decisions and Orders, 26:1188; Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 68–69. All of these companies employed Mexican immigrants. Seeking a stable fuel source during the boom years of war production, Chino had bought the Victor American Fuel Company in 1917 and renamed it the Gallup American Coal Company. See Huggard, “Environmental and Economic Change,” 203.
56. By 1915, Chino’s operations employed “853 men in the open pits and about 1,200 at the power plant and mill at Hurley.” By the end of World War I, some 12,000 workers depended on Chino. See Huggard, “Environmental and Economic Change,” 121, 128. Over the first half of the twentieth century, “with the exception of the Santa Fe Railroad, the [Santa Rita] copper mines were the state’s largest employer” (Nash, “New Mexico in the Otero Era,” 8).
57. Complicating the lexicon further is the fact that “miner” can also refer to the mine owner. I use the term “mine operator” to refer to the owners and managers (when I do not need to distinguish between the two).
58. Clearly a miner’s work life depended as well on the work of others, principally women, to feed and clothe them. I discuss the family economy and the sexual division of labor in Chapter 6.
59. Cages, or man-cages, carried people; skips carried supplies down the shaft and ore and waste products back up. Occasionally, “skips” referred to the apparatus that carried both men and ore. See Wendel, “Mining in Butte Forty Years Ago,” 60–61; Lewis, Elements of Mining; and Young, Elements of Mining.
60. Young, Elements of Mining, 209. Speeds increased for deeper shafts: a shallow shaft of 500 feet, for instance, could accommodate a hoisting speed of 1,200 feet per minute, while a shaft deeper than 3,000 feet permitted speeds up to 3,000 feet per minute.
61. National War Labor Board case 111-13879-D (22-D-185), WFMR, box 866, folder 1.
62. Geological features and the underground environment dictated the specific method of stoping. Shrinkage stoping depended on strong ore deposits. Miners worked from the floor level upward, blasting the rock face above them. They left broken ore in the stope to support the walls, which received further support from timbering and sometimes from pillars of unmined ore. Miners used cut-and-fill stoping when confronted with weak ore structures. In this process, miners removed the ore in parallel, vertical slices; as they removed each slice, they left waste in the stope as a support and also as a floor from which to continue mining. Even weaker ore required square-set stoping, a costly method in which miners immediately replaced the mined ore with timbers. Asarco’s Groundhog mine used this method. See Lewis, Elements of Mining, and Young, Elements of Mining.
63. Ira Wright commented in 1944 that most of the district’s mines used loader operators, not hand shovels. See SCDP, May 29, 1944.
64. The best account of Chino’s technology and work processes is in Huggard, “Environmental and Economic Change,” 90–218.
65. Clemons, Christiansen, and James, Southwestern New Mexico, 29. In March 1943, a carload of dynamite was used to move half a million tons of rock in a single blast. See “Big Blast at Chino,” New Mexico Miner and Prospector, March–April 1943, 3.
66. Clemons, Christiansen, and James, Southwestern New Mexico, 29.
67. Ibid. SCDP, July 10, 1944, describes the short-lived New Mexico Ore Processing Company’s zinc mill in Bayard. USSRMC later bought this mill.
68. NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 26:1225, 1227.
69. Memo from Carlos Castañeda, assistant to the chairman, to Bruce Hunt, hearing examiner, President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, November 21, 1944, FEPCR, box 339. The manuscript censuses for 1920 and 1930 show the same job segregation but do not explain which jobs had lines of promotion.
70. Jeffrey Garcilazo (“Traqueros,” 16) similarly argues that, by the 1880s, railroad “track labor became synonymous with racial subordination.”
71. Six Mexican men, living in Central, were firemen for a stationary boiler in 1930. See 1930 manuscript census, Precinct 1, Central.
72. NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 26:1228; 1920 manuscript census, Precinct 13, Santa Rita.
73. NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 26:1226.
74. Moses’s grandfather had been a St. Louis doctor, and his father, John, served in the Confederate army before selling shoes in St. Louis; Horace’s mother also came from a moderately genteel southern family. John Moses set up as a merchant along the Mimbres River, where his three sons worked intermittently in commerce, on local Anglo ranches, and in the mines. See New Mexico Miner and Prospector, June 1944, 1, 8; Coan, History of New Mexico, 2:353; and Davis, ed., Historical Encyclopedia of New Mexico, 555.
75. SCDP, August 6, 1951; position roster, Santa Rita, July 13, 1944, WFMR, box 864, folder 4.
76. See Probert, “Discord at Real del Monte,” 47; Woyski, “Women and Mining in the Old West,” 40.
77. Murphy, Gathering of Rivers; Hurtado, Indian Survival; Woyski, “Women and Mining in the Old West,” 40.
78. Guérin-Gonzales, “From Ludlow to Camp Solidarity,” 303–9.
79. Rowse, Cornish in America, 344. Undoubtedly, some women worked underground; a sketch from 1870 shows one woman in a group of underground miners suffering from heat exhaustion in Nevada, and a few immigrant women in Pennsylvania may have worked underground as mine laborers in addition to helping their families by collecting coal from banks of anthracite waste. See Sloane and Sloane, Pictorial History of American Mining, 184, and Priscilla Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 131.
80. “The Idol of Groom Creek Miners Union,” Miners’ Magazine, June 2, 1904, 7. Her husband presided over Arizona’s State Federation of Labor in 1904.
81. Miners’ Magazine, September 17, 1903, 3.
82. “The Idol of Groom Creek Miners Union,” 7.
83. Miners’ Magazine, September 17, 1903, 3. See Lawrence Glickman, Living Wage.
84. The approximation is necessary because the census statistics, which I used for the total female population, did not specify the sex breakdown of the age groups; to calculate adult females, I halved the number of persons under age fifteen, assuming that this sex ratio was more likely than not to be even, and subtracted that number from the total number of females.
85. 1930 manuscript census, Precincts 11, 13, and 16.
86. As Josiah McC. Heyman has argued, companies control towns openly, by threatening to take away jobs, housing, and tax payments, and discreetly, by controlling “real estate, zoning, and bank loans.” Because all members of a family are connected to the company, “the social field of action—everyday give and take among people—is strongly coherent. The nature of social interaction in one domain, let us say segmented pay in the job market, is likely to be reproduced in another, say among children in school. Grievances accumulated at the company store overlap with grievances accumulated in the mine shafts by men. One’s self-understanding, such as ‘race,’ is synonymous with other self-understandings, such as ‘union.’ . . . Residents take stances of loyalty or opposition to the ever-present company which persist for years, transmitted through family, union, and city politics” (Heyman, “In the Shadow of the Smokestacks,” 158–59).
87. John Sully, commenting in 1910, cited in SCDP, March 31, 1951.
88. Ibid.
89. Milbauer, “Historical Geography of the Silver City Mining Region,” 64.
90. Huginnie, “‘Strikitos,’”–183; Jameson, All That Glitters.
91. 1910 manuscript census; 1920 manuscript census. The 1920 census identifies them as zinc miners. I am assuming that these are Empire Zinc employees, since Peru had not begun operations and Blackhawk produced very little zinc: a yearly average of 712 tons of zinc in 1919 and 1920, compared to Empire Zinc’s yearly average of 18,685 tons of zinc from 1911 to 1920. See Finlay, Report of Appraisal, 55, 59.
92. John Sully, commenting in 1910, cited in SCDP, March 31, 1951.
93. Bill Wood, interview by author. Wood’s father was half Anglo and half Mexican, and Bill Wood attributes to his father’s friendship with Chino foreman Harry Thorne his family’s good fortune in getting a water pipe.
94. Arturo Flores, interview by author.
95. Mariana Ramírez, “The Road to Peace,” Union Worker, January 1951, 2.
96. Southwest of Silver City, the Phelps-Dodge Company bought many mining claims in the Burro Mountain mining district and built a model company town, Tyrone, for its Anglo and Mexican workers. Urged by the wife of its president, the company designed buildings in the “Spanish mission” style that had been gaining currency in the Southwest. Appreciation of pre-Anglo culture went only so far, of course, and the company made sure that the actual Mexicans lived in the cheapest houses with the fewest amenities. But the post–World War I depression forced Phelps-Dodge to shut down its Tyrone operations in 1921, and Chino was left alone to carry the torch of corporate paternalism. (Chino, too, closed down in 1921, but it reopened the following year.) See Magnusson, “Modern Copper Mining Town,” and Willis, “Housing at Tyrone, New Mexico.”
97. These claims are based on evidence from interviews, reminiscences, and a survey of news coverage, society pages, jury and electoral notices, graduations, and advertisements in the Silver City Daily Press from 1941 to 1955.
98. Aurora Chávez, interview by author; Alice Sandoval, interview by author. Hurley High School classrooms were integrated.
99. Except for two teachers in private Spanish-speaking classes, all teachers in the 1930 census for Hanover and Santa Rita were Anglo. (See Table 2.) Newspaper reports on school activities confirm this pattern for the 1940s in Santa Rita, Hurley, Bayard, Fierro, and Cliff. Two or three Spanish-named teachers taught at Central School in the 1940s, and both San Juan and San Lorenzo in the Mimbres Valley had Spanish-named teachers; Fortunata Valencia, for example, taught at the San Juan School from 1930 to 1947. Mrs. Cruz Galván Valenzuela taught at Hanover School in the mid-1940s. According to her nephew, Frank Ramirez, Valenzuela achieved her education against the wishes of her father, who opposed female education. She graduated from State Teachers College, taught school in Artesia, in eastern New Mexico, then returned to Grant County and later helped establish bilingual education. See Elizabeth Horcasitas, interview by Polly Evans, Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library, RGT253, Las Cruces, N.M.; Ramirez, Remembering Fierro, 64; and SCDP, July 1, 1943; September 20, 1943; September 11, 1945; February 12, 1948; February 27, 1948; March 19, 1948; March 26, 1948; May 7, 1948; September 2, 1948; January 29, 1949; August 31, 1949. On punishment for speaking Spanish in Grant County schools, see Elizabeth Horcasitas interview; Huggard, “Environmental and Economic Change,” 259; Anita and Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author; Matías Rivera, interview by author; and Aurora Chávez, interview by author. Neither Arturo Flores nor Dora Madero recall being punished for speaking Spanish in school; Alice Sandoval said that such punishment depended on the individual teacher. See Flores, interview by author; Madero, interview by author; and Sandoval interview. In 1919, at the urging of Governor Octaviano Larrazolo, New Mexico’s legislature passed an act supporting bilingual education, but the state board of education stressed English instruction and the act was repealed in 1923. See Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, “Which Language Will Our Children Learn?,” 180–84.
100. Graduation rolls, SCDP, May 20, 1941; May 21, 1941; May 23, 1941; May 14, 1942; May 18, 1942; May 15, 1944; May 18, 1944; May 15, 1945; May 18, 1945; May 29, 1945; May 14, 1947; May 16, 1947; May 21, 1947; May 26, 1948; May 27, 1948; May 28, 1948; May 29, 1948; May 24, 1949; May 23, 1950; May 24, 1950; May 15, 1952; May 23, 1951; May 22, 1952.
101. Himes, “Unions and the Chino Mine,” 6.
102. In this respect, they resemble the cross-class social organizations that historian Elizabeth Jameson found in Cripple Creek, before the violent and divisive strike of 1904. See Jameson, All That Glitters, 88–90.
103. For Boy Scouts, see SCDP, February 14, 1944; April 24, 1945; September 21, 1948. For Girl Scouts, see SCDP, February 17, 1944; February 14, 1945; January 2, 1948; April 6, 1948; February 27, 1950; March 11, 1950.
104. For movie theaters, see letter from J. P. Sepulveda to SCDP, January 26, 1942. Albert H. Vigil recalled an incident from his childhood when he and his mother went to the movies. A couple of Anglo women in the row ahead of them turned around and told them, “You have to go sit over there.” Vigil’s mother replied, “If you don’t like it you can go back to Oklahoma,” and that settled the issue. See Albert H. Vigil, interview by author. For dances, see SCDP, April 11, 1941; January 13, 1942; January 20, 1942; February 5, 1942; August 4, 1944; September 8, 1944; November 8, 1946; February 3, 1949; April 15, 1949; July 2, 1949; July 1, 1950; October 20, 1950; January 18, 1952; February 15, 1952.
105. Lists of precincts, SCDP, September 10, 1942; November 2, 1946; May 24, 1947; September 6, 1951; April 22, 1952.
106. New Mexico was exceptional in the enfranchisement of its Mexican American citizens. For contrasts with Texas, Arizona, and California, see Gómez-Quiñones, Chicano Politics.
107. Mariano Lucero and Cecilio Torres were Hanover’s constables during this period, and Joe G. Arciero Jr. was Fierro’s. See SCDP, November 10, 1942; January 3, 1947; April 5, 1950.
108. Lists of juries, SCDP, September 16, 1942; September 8, 1943; September 5, 1944; August 23, 1945; March 26, 1947; November 25, 1947; August 23, 1948; October 24, 1949; December 1, 1949; September 12, 1950; March 7, 1951; May 28, 1951. Voting rolls formed the basis for the first round of jury selection; since Mexican Americans did not vote significantly less than Anglos, it is puzzling that so few would serve on juries. Jury selection, though, was a mixture of random selection—names for the venire were drawn from the “wheel”—and the judgment of District Judge A. W. Marshall, who chose a smaller panel.
109. Dolores Jiménez, interview by author and Sam Sills. Jiménez is the daughter of Margarita and William Villines.
110. “Grant County Sheriffs for 100 Years”; James Blair obituary, SCDP, February 3, 1941; Jones, Memories of Santa Rita; Bill Wood, interview by author.
111. 1920 manuscript census; Santa Rita seniority list, 1947, WFMR, box 870, folder 15. Other Fletchers (possibly Frank’s cousins or brothers) had Spanish first names and also worked menial jobs at Chino.
112. I am indebted to Bernard Himes for this and following descriptions of Jackling.
113. Back at home in San Francisco, Jackling liked to cruise the bay in his gigantic yacht, also named the Cyprus.
114. SCDP, October 21, 1935. In one scene in Salt of the Earth, the striking miners come across a magazine article about the company president hunting big game in Africa. Their admiration prompts them to undertake a hunting expedition of their own, which jeopardizes the strike.
115. At least one Mexican American couple named their son “Sully”; Sully Armijo belonged to Hanover Lodge 54 of the Alianza Hispano Americana in 1951. See SCDP, January 30, 1951.
116. Silver City Enterprise, June 14, 1912.
117. See O’Neill, “Domesticity Deployed,” for an excellent gender analysis of the Bisbee deportation.
118. Melzer, “Exiled in the Desert,” 281. The Gallup residents were sent by railroad to Belen, “where they were held in custody just outside the town’s railroad yards.”
119. Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, 222.
1. See Chapter 4.
2. SCDP, November 14, 1950.
3. SCDP, June 8, 1951; June 9, 1951.
4. SCDP, June 9, 1951. Empire Zinc superintendent S. S. Huyett confirmed this when he testified before the NLRB. See SCDP, September 26, 1951.
5. Bayard Journal, June 3, 1950.
6. Grant County marriage records for Dorman Lee Capshaw, Lee Ross Capshaw, and Patricia Capshaw Ney identify their birthplaces as Cardin, Kiowa, and Picher, Oklahoma, respectively.
7. Local 890 activist José Carrillo identified these three men in a letter to Senator Dennis Chávez in July 1951. See José Carrillo to Dennis Chávez, July 12, 1951, Dennis Chávez Papers, box 208, folder 9, CSR.
8. SCDP, June 11, 1951.
9. NIRA was passed in 1933 during Roosevelt’s “First Hundred Days.” The Supreme Court struck it down in 1935, but the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act (1935), codified similar prolabor principles and was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937. The Wagner Act created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which sponsored and oversaw elections for union representation and meditated some labor-management conflicts. NIRA also called on industries to set up codes that would regulate prices and curb overproduction, and in some industries, labor unions thrust themselves into the process. But as energetic as Mine-Mill was in organizing workers in the 1930s, it carried absolutely no weight in drafting the copper, lead, or zinc codes.
10. Himes, “General Managers at Chino,” 10, 12.
11. 1930 manuscript census, Precinct 13, Santa Rita.
12. NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 26:1189. At the time, Local 63 represented workers at Santa Rita and Hurley.
13. Rubenstein, “Great Gallup Coal Strike of 1933,” 175.
14. Ibid. For a fictional account of the labor conflict in Gallup, see Philip Stevenson’s [Lars Lawrence’s] series The Seed, consisting of Morning, Noon and Night, Out of the Dust, Old Father Antic, and The Hoax.
15. On agriculture, see Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture; Daniel, Bitter Harvest; Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold; Healey and Isserman, California Red. On canneries, see Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives. On California organizing more broadly, see Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History. For a synthesis of Mexican working-class history in the Southwest and Midwest, see Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights.
16. Santa Rita officers were C. M. Gumfory, president; Martin Gallegos, vice president; Jack Kemp, financial secretary and treasurer; Samuel Sáenz, recording secretary; Julián Horcasitas, warden; G. O. Biles, conductor; and Stone Mayes, T. B. Benjamin, and F. O. Smith, trustees. Hurley officers were Julio Grado, president; Ysmael Moreno, financial secretary and treasurer; and Marcelo Avalos, trustee. See Nev. Consol. Copper Corp. v. NLRB, 122 F.2d 587, 593 (10th Cir. 1941); and NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 26:1218, 1219, 1221.
17. See Arneson, “‘Like Banquo’s Ghost,’” 1609.
18. Industrial unions organized all the workers in a workplace, regardless of occupation. Craft unions, by contrast, organized workers in a particular trade or occupation.
19. Huginnie, “‘Strikitos,’” 157. Huginnie comments that this 1902 effort failed and, in fact, “resulted in the entire Anglo work force being fired.”
20. Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism, 4–5.
21. Resolution 25, in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (Salt Lake City, August 6–13, 1928), day 5, 3. The following year the convention cited Canadian and Mexican violations of U.S. immigration laws as reason for prohibiting any immigration for ten years; a resolution to this effect passed, but only after it was amended so that “in no way” would it refer to Canadians. See Resolution 32, in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (Salt Lake City, August 5–10, 1929), day 3, 1.
22. “Annual Report of the President, International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, 1940,” in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (Denver, August 5–10, 1940), 81–82.
23. The “communist take-over” of Mine-Mill is Jensen’s primary concern in Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism. I agree with Jensen that Mine-Mill became a union close to the CP, but I interpret this change more positively, in large part because of its effects on cross-ethnic organizing in the Southwest.
24. On Mine-Mill among African Americans, see Huntley, “Iron Ore Miners and Mine Mill” and “Red Scare and Black Workers,” and Kelley, Hammer and Hoe.
25. See Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, 90–113, and Rubenstein, “Great Gallup Coal Strike of 1933.”
26. NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 26:1190–91.
27. Ibid., 1191.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 1203. Cruz was born in Mexico, and his union work was especially courageous given the rash of deportations that took place during the Great Depression.
30. Ibid., 1191.
31. Benigno Montez, quoted in Deborah Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” in Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 114.
32. Mariana Ramírez, quoted in Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” 115.
33. Nevada Consolidated alleged that union supporters made these threats, but the company’s foremen, including Hap Thorne, admitted to the labor board that they never investigated these threats; by contrast, union men’s testimony was either corroborated by management (indirectly) or simply never challenged.
34. NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 26:1204.
35. Nev. Consol. Copper Corp. v. NLRB, 122 F.2d 587, 594 (10th Cir. 1941).
36. Himes, “General Managers at Chino,” 11.
37. Two years later, Mine-Mill workers at the American Metals Company in Terrero, N.M., were also defeated when the company shut down indefinitely. See SCDP, February 21, 1936.
38. SCDP, July 1, 1935; November 27, 1935; January 10, 1936. Chino insisted that its properties were worth only $7 million in 1935, while the state tax commission set the value at $12 million; the two parties eventually agreed on $9.5 million, which maintained Grant County’s classification.
39. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook 1935, 275. Before closing in October 1934, the Chino Mines operated at only 20 percent of capacity. For Empire Zinc, see U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook 1937, 470, and SCDP, March 11, 1937. Empire Zinc reopened with about 100 workers, many of whom were former employees.
40. Katherine Benton analyzes the corporate maternalism that accompanied corporate paternalism in Bisbee. See Benton, “What About Women in the White Man’s Camp?,”; Finn, Tracing the Veins; O’Neill, “Domesticity Deployed”; Mercier, Anaconda; and Deutsch, No Separate Refuge.
41. SCDP, August 7, 1934; December 11, 1934.
42. Montoya, “Roots of Economic and Ethnic Divisions,” 21. Although this was supposed to be a voluntary program, there is some evidence that families were pressured to send their sons to CCC in order to reduce the number of families on direct relief. Grant County’s welfare administrator, Juanita Langer, was told by the assistant director of public welfare to “withdraw relief from families where eligible boys refuse to enlist in the CCC . . . in order that [Aid to Dependent Children] grants may be cut down” (ibid., 22).
43. New Mexican Hispanic youth encountered discrimination in the CCC, but it was nothing compared to that faced by Tejanos. See Montoya, “Roots of Economic and Ethnic Divisions,” 29–32, and Melzer, Coming of Age in the Depression.
44. This pattern fits analyses articulated by Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, and Kessler-Harris, In Search of Equity, on the gendered nature of the welfare state.
45. J. I. Kemp, Box 971, Santa Rita, to Gov. Clyde K. Tingley, April 1, 1935, Gov. Clyde K. Tingley Papers, box 10, folder 322, NMSRCA. The workers had protested their unsafe transportation to the work site, and the governor helped end the practice.
46. Ysmael Moreno to Gov. Clyde K. Tingley, July 12, 1935, Gov. Clyde K. Tingley Papers, box 10, folder 332, NMSRCA.
47. NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 26:1197.
48. Ibid., 1205–6. McCraney applied to general foreman Thorne the following spring, but Thorne turned him down.
49. Ibid., 1195.
50. Ibid., 1196, 1221.
51. This was the case for Rafael Kirker, Julián Horcasitas, Juan Vera, and Simon Sias. See ibid., 1208.
52. Himes, “General Managers at Chino,” 7–8.
53. Sixty-one men filed the first complaint, another forty-two names were added after the first hearing, and thirteen more were added after the second hearing. See NLRB, Decisions and Orders, vol. 26, Appendix A, 1240–41.
54. NLRB v. Nev. Consol. Copper Corp., 316 U.S. 105, 107 (1942).
55. Himes, “General Managers at Chino,” 13.
56. Here I differ with Zaragosa Vargas, who argues in Labor Rights Are Civil Rights that Mine-Mill’s commitment to the no-strike pledge fundamentally compromised its commitment to racial equality. I find instead that Mine-Mill both appealed to Mexican Americans and followed through with contracts and grievances that aimed to redress inequality.
57. Luis Leobardo Arroyo (“Chicano Participation in Organized Labor,” 290–99) notes that while CIO labor unions were important to Mexican American workers in Los Angeles, the citywide CIO Council was also important as an organizational form that fought discrimination in the community beyond the workplace.
58. NLRB, Decisions and Orders, 19:596. The employment manager, Murray Bateman, probably regretted those words once they made their way into the 1939 NLRB hearings, because in almost every instance the board found that the company had wrongfully discriminated against union supporters.
59. Dinwiddie, “Rise of the Mine-Mill Union,” 51.
60. SCDP, April 25, 1941; August 14, 1941.
61. SCDP, November 10, 1941. No one could take his vacation until November 1942. The union checkoff would have made collecting union dues more efficient because the company’s payroll office would have deducted the dues and given them directly to the union local.
62. Asarco leased the Hanover mill from Blackhawk Consolidated, and in 1950 it did not renew the lease, turning instead to its larger mill in Deming. Mine-Mill represented Asarco office workers but lost jurisdiction in 1944.
63. CIO News—Mine-Mill Edition, May 26, 1941, 2.
64. Staff Report, Silver City Area, District #2, March 21, 1942, WFMR, box 294, folder 3.
65. For Hurley membership, see Local 69 monthly reports, 1941–46, WFMR, box 865, folder 3. For Hurley officers, see SCDP, April 4, 1941. For Santa Rita officers, see SCDP, April 17, 1941. (There are no extant monthly reports for Santa Rita Local 63 for this period.)
66. Staff Report, Silver City Area, District #2, May 23, 1942, WFMR, box 294, folder 3; SCDP, May 27, 1942.
67. SCDP, July 20, 1942.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. The Chino Metal Trades Council was founded in February 1941. It was composed of the International Association of Machinists, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Steam and Operating Engineers International Union, United Brotherhood of Carpenters, International Boilermakers and Iron Ship Builders, United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters, and International Union of Blacksmiths. See SCDP, February 7, 1941. A year later, the AFL created a Southwestern District Metal Trades Council, corresponding to Mine-Mill’s Southwest Industrial Council. See SCDP, February 24, 1942.
71. Himes, “Unions and the Chino Mine,” 9.
72. De la Torre’s father had been a track laborer on the Santa Fe Railroad for twenty-five years. See SCDP, May 5, 1941; May 21, 1941.
73. Staff Report, Silver City Area, District #2, April 25, 1942, WFMR, box 294, folder 3; SCDP, February 1, 1943. The AHA was a mutualista, or fraternal organization, for Mexican Americans, founded in Tucson in 1894. It provided burial services for members and hosted U.S. and Mexican patriotic celebrations. Lodge No. 17 was formed in Silver City in 1904, and by the 1940s there were lodges in Hanover, Bayard, Santa Rita, and Hurley. See SCDP, February 1, 1943; August 2, 1944; June 17, 1947; March 30, 1951. Evidence that miners belonged to AHA comes from the lodges’ locations—few people unaffiliated with the mines lived in those mining camps—and from obituaries. See, for example, SCDP, March 26, 1947. On the importance of mutualistas, see Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors.
74. SCDP, March 10, 1941.
75. SCDP, April 16, 1941.
76. Ernie De Baca, quoted in SCDP, October 10, 1941.
77. SCDP, October 6, 1942; October 30, 1948.
78. SCDP, May 22, 1942.
79. SCDP, May 25, 1942.
80. George Knott, Staff Report, Silver City Area, District #2, June 6, 1942, WFMR, box 294, folder 3.
81. Ibid.
82. SCDP, July 9, 1942.
83. “Agreement Covering Wages and Working Conditions between Nevada Consolidated Copper Corporation, Chino Mines Division, and International Union of Mine-Mill and Smelter Workers Locals Nos. 63 and 69, July 7, 1942,” WFMR, box 864, folder 2; SCDP, January 26, 1942.
84. Staff Report, Silver City Area, District #2, July 25, 1942, WFMR, box 294, folder 3. At the Peru Mining Company, George Knott, Jess Nichols, Gussie Nard of the Copper Flats shaft, and Juan García of the Pewabic shaft negotiated workers’ first contract in August 1942. (Workers at Peru’s Kearney shaft had not yet finished a run-off election, so they were not immediately covered by the contract.) Their contract guaranteed job security and promotion according to seniority, rather than on the basis of “race, creed, color, and national origin,” and granted vacations and time-and-a-half pay for overtime work. See SCDP, August 7, 1942.
85. Union’s statement of position and brief, April 2, 1945, National War Labor Board case 111-13879-D (22-D-185), WFMR, box 866. The Fair Employment Practices Committee, discussed below, found that it was difficult to get Chino to upgrade Mexicans precisely because Chino’s doing so would take them out of Mine-Mill’s jurisdiction and place them in the AFL’s jurisdiction—which lacked contract language forbidding discrimination on the basis of nationality. See Memo from Ernest G. Trimble to Lawrence W. Cramer re: Discrimination in the Southwest, [December 1944], FEPCR, box 339. It is interesting, however, that sometime between 1941 and 1945, Richard P. Erbacher, the corresponding secretary of Chino’s Metal Trades Council, notified the committee that the “mining companies of the Southwest discriminated against Americans of Spanish descent, no matter [their] education, training, or ability.” See “New Mexico Complaints,” FEPCR, box 339.
86. Local 604 daybook, WFMR, box 866. The daybook, which covers 1942–46, lists initiations only in 1942.
87. Local 890 checkoff, New Mexico Consolidated Mining Co. and Peru Mining Co., January 1948, WFMR, box 882.
88. Asarco Local 530 daybook and petty cash record, WFMR, box 865, book 2.
89. Among the Anglo blacklisted workers who stayed in Mine-Mill were Earl Allen, locomotive engineer; Joseph Baxter, locomotive engineer; Asa T. Carr, railroad brakeman; Angus Gruwell, steam shoveler; John “Jack” Howe, locomotive engineer; James L. McCraney, steam shovel fireman; and Charles H. Williams, locomotive fireman.
90. The National War Labor Board (NWLB) upheld the union’s position, but Kennecott general manager Horace Moses hesitated to fire so many workers. See SCDP, July 26, 1943.
91. Carlos Castañeda, assistant to the chairman, to Will Maslow, director of field operations, President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, May 8, 1944, FEPCR, box 339. Its least objectionable stanza reads: “There is Mexicans, Indians, Wops, and Chinks. So damn many foreigners the damn place stinks. It’s ajabber jabber here and jabber there. I am so disgusted I want to pull my hair” (Anonymous, “The C.I.O. and the A.F. of L.,” April 9, 1944, FEPCR, box 339).
92. Based on Santa Rita position rosters from 1944, 1947, and 1949, the percentage of laborers with Spanish names increased from 85 percent in 1944 (196 of the 231 laborers) to 99 percent in 1949 (179 of the 181 laborers). See position roster, Santa Rita, July 13, 1944, WFMR, box 864, folder 4; seniority list, Santa Rita, July 1, 1947, WFMR, box 870, folder 15; and seniority list, Kennecott Copper Corporation, July 1, 1949, WFMR, box 870, folder 24. The departure of Navajo men from the wartime workforce partly accounts for the increased percentage of Mexican American laborers.
93. New Mexico Employment Security Commission, reported in SCDP, February 13, 1941; June 25, 1941; October 9, 1941. In May, the commission “placed 400 more workers than in April while the number of persons registered for employment dropped by 500.” In 1941, the commission made 2,320 payments to Grant County recipients; that number dropped significantly over the following two years, to 1,054 in 1942 and 33 in 1943. The average monthly payment to Grant County recipients was quite small, although it increased over time: $9.84 in 1941, $10.11 in 1942, and $13.94 in 1943. See New Mexico Employment Security Commission, “Annual Report (1941),” 22; “Annual Report (1942),” 21; “Annual Report (1943),” 23.
94. Nevada Consolidated first raised wages in July and then again in November. See SCDP, July 21, 1941; November 14, 1941.
95. SCDP, April 1, 1942.
96. “Mine Managers Tell of Manpower Problems,” New Mexico Miner and Prospector, November 1942, 8.
97. SCDP, July 17, 1944.
98. On women employees, see Chapter 6; on Navajo workers, see Huggard, “Environmental and Economic Change,” 157–58.
99. Himes, “General Managers at Chino,” 19; Franco, “Beyond Reservation Boundaries,” 249.
100. Huggard, “Environmental and Economic Change,” 275.
101. Clinton Jencks, interview by author. Bernard L. Himes disputes this characterization, reporting that “the cabins provided basic shelter, warmth, water, and, in the open yard, room to tether nanny goats. Mine-Mill protested the accommodations. . . . The company, unhappily, yielded to non-Navajo pressure, evicted the tenants, and did away with the mini-village” (Himes, “General Managers at Chino,” 20).
102. Ibid. I have not been able to get employment records showing if Navajo women, as well as men, worked at Chino.
103. Morgan, Domestic Mining Industry, 213; New Mexico Miner and Prospector, November 1942, 1. The New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, founded in 1939 by mine owners and engineers, approved of this government interference in the free market because by November 1942 this measure “had reduced labor loss in [logging and mining] by 80 percent or more” (New Mexico Miner and Prospector, November 1942, 2).
104. “5,306 soldiers were released by the Army [in this second round of furloughs], and of these 4,546 were hired–3,168 going to copper mines, 1,136 to zinc mines, and 242 to molybdenum mines” (Morgan, Domestic Mining Industry, 223).
105. Nelson Lichtenstein analyzes these problems most thoroughly in Labor’s War at Home. See also Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State; Milkman, Gender at Work; Zieger, CIO; and Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights.
106. Daniel, Chicano Workers. President Roosevelt created the FEPC in 1941 to stave off the mass demonstration that A. Philip Randolph threatened to stage in Washington, D.C., against continued discrimination in defense industries. Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights, interprets the FEPC as especially weak.
107. Dinwiddie, “Rise of the Mine-Mill Union,” 53.
108. Memo from Carlos Castañeda, assistant to the chairman, to Will Laslow, director of field operations, FEPC, June 23, 1944, and Report and Recommendations re Cases Involving Southwest Copper Mining Industry, May 18, 1945, FEPCR, box 339. In “Region X” as a whole (Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico), 25 percent of the FEPC’s cases from July 1943 to June 1944 were dismissed on the merits and 40 percent satisfactorily adjusted. See Committee on Fair Employment Practice, First Report, 115, table 1-B.
109. Memo from Carlos Castañeda, assistant to the chairman, to Will Laslow, director of field operations, FEPC, September 1, 1944, FEPCR, box 39.
110. Southwest Industrial Union of Mine-Mill meeting minutes, March 22, 1942, Miami, Arizona, WFMR, box 294, folder 3.
111. Local 530 represented office workers until 1944.
112. National War Labor Board case 111-613-D, FEPCR, box 339. Holguín had received a substantial wage increase in December 1942, and by the following summer he was earning the salary guaranteed by the union’s new contract with Asarco. The case, then, concerned back pay between 1941 and December 1942, and the NMC took this into account in its decision.
113. 14 War Labor Reports 146, decision of the Nonferrous Metals Commission, upheld by the National War Labor Board in 18 War Labor Reports 591. The three Arizona companies were Miami Copper Company, International Smelting and Refining Company, and Inspiration Consolidated.
114. Dinwiddie, “Rise of the Mine-Mill Union,” 54.
115. Ibid.
116. New Mexico Miner and Prospector, January 1943, 1. After the speeches, “the huge crowd rose and repeated the Oath of Allegiance, and then followed the spectacular demonstration of the Army in action, which thrilled everyone present” (ibid., September 1943, 5).
117. SCDP, September 28, 1942; New Mexico Miner and Prospector, November 1942, 1.
118. See Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, and Harris, Right to Manage. Similarly, the mining industry had stoutly resisted union influence on the industry codes mandated by the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act.
119. SCDP, December 16, 1941.
120. SCDP, April 9, 1942; April 27, 1942. For more on Grant County’s participation in the 200th, see Cave, Beyond Courage.
121. SCDP, December 11, 1941.
122. SCDP, December 22, 1941. There is no evidence that miners saw in Robinson’s comments a concession of workers’ rights or power.
123. At least one Bayard Anglo, L. A. Jesson, also saw in the war effort little room for discrimination. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he wrote to the Silver City Daily Press: “Rather shocks me to see racial color mentioned in newspapers and even broadcasts [about the fighting. Our allies, the] Filipinos, Chinos, SudAmericanos[,] ain’t lilly-white [sic], amigo. Y ademas algunos de la fuerzas Americanos, incluyen tropas que no son blancos [And furthermore some of the American forces, include troops that aren’t white]—but are damned good fighting men and real Americans.” (SCDP, December 18, 1941; grammatical errors in Spanish are in the original).
124. Managers often “led” the meetings in which they explained the payroll-deduction system, but apparently most workers understood only when provided with a Spanish translation.
125. SCDP, February 11, 1942.
126. Staff Report, Silver City Area, District #2, [March 21, 1942], WFMR, box 294, folder 3. Other Mine-Mill defense bond promoters included Local 69 president Angus Gruwell and vice-president Julián Horcasitas, both of whom had been active in the 1930s disputes with Chino. Horcasitas was the brother-in-law of Juan Valencia, who was killed in action at Pearl Harbor and for whom New Mexico’s first “Spanish American VFW Post” (Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4150) would be named in May 1943. Horcasitas was also the junior vice-commander of this post. See SCDP, February 6, 1942, and May 22, 1942.
127. SCDP, January 27, 1943. Ninety-four percent of Hurley’s workers, for instance, were signed up for payroll deduction, a figure that included all of the track gang, all of the boiler shop, and 97 percent of the labor department. See SCDP, January 13, 1943.
128. SCDP, September 29, 1944.
129. Southwest Industrial Union Council president Clyde Sparks, Miami, Arizona, and Secretary-Treasurer W. H. Solem, Carlsbad, New Mexico, to New Mexico governor John J. Dempsey, [1943], Governor John J. Dempsey Papers, box 2, 1943, NMSRCA.
130. Western Division, American Mining Congress, “Declaration of Policy,” reprinted in New Mexico Miner and Prospector, March 1944, 3. Kennecott labor relations specialist James K. Richardson reaffirmed in 1946 “that collective bargaining is here to stay” (James K. Richardson, Address to 1946 Meeting of New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, reprinted in New Mexico Miner and Prospector, June 1946, 4).
131. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 100. Over ten million belonged to the AFL. For the strike wave, see “Postwar Work Stoppages Caused by Labor-Management Disputes,” Monthly Labor Review 63 (December 1946), 872. Most of these strikes concerned wages, and most involved members of the CIO.
132. Resolutions adopted by New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, published in New Mexico Miner and Prospector, May 1946, 7. Grant Countian Ira Wright chaired the resolutions committee. See also Harris, Right to Manage.
133. Even Taft-Hartley did not fully satisfy mine industry leaders, who wanted to prohibit industrywide bargaining, forbid “union proposals [in collective bargaining] incroaching [sic] on the employer’s right to manage his business,” and deny any representation rights or strike rights to unions that failed to get rid of Communist officers. See Western Division, American Mining Congress, “Declaration of Policy,” reprinted in New Mexico Miner and Prospector, December 1947, 4. Both the AFL and the CIO opposed Taft-Hartley’s movement through the legislature and persistently called for its repeal in the years after passage.
134. As Richard M. Freeland argues in Truman Doctrine, although President Truman opposed Taft-Hartley, and even vetoed it (the Senate overruled his veto), his foreign relations policy, first in Greece and then in the rest of Europe, emphasized the dangers of world communism. His domestic political opponents then used this very discourse to promote their own antilabor policies.
135. Clinton Jencks to Maurice Travis, June 26, 1948, WFMR, box 867, folder 1; SCDP, June 24, 1948; June 30, 1948; August 20, 1948.
136. Arthur Flores, B. G. Provencio, José T. Morales, and Clinton Jencks to W. H. Goodrich, July 10, 1948, WFMR, box 870, folder 7. This letter referred to Kennecott’s letter of May 1. Flores was president of the Santa Rita unit, Provencio president of the Hurley unit, Morales the delegate to Mine-Mill’s national Kennecott Council, and Jencks the president of Local 890.
137. Clinton Jencks to Senator Dennis Chávez, February 7, 1949, WFMR, box 294, folder 13. Local 890 also sent petitions signed by 500 members for the international office to circulate among congressmen. See Jencks to Elizabeth Sasuly, February 7, 1949, WFMR, box 294, folder 13.
138. Clinton Jencks, interview by author. Jencks recalled that both he and his wife, Virginia, worked to convince union members to give the new strategy a try.
139. Ibid. The June 11 date comes from the July 11, 1948, letter cited in note 136, above.
140. I analyze this political campaign in Chapter 4.
141. See Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism.
142. Local 890 financial secretary José S. Campos to John Clark, April 3, 1950, WFMR, box 294, folder 13. See also Paul B. Sáenz and Angel R. Bustos to Reid Robinson, December 4, 1946, WFMR, box 865, folder 11. Sáenz and Bustos were officers of Asarco Local 530 in 1948.
143. Local 530 petty cash record and membership, WFMR, box 865, book 2. Rafael Lardizábal Sr. joined the NLRB suit against Nevada Consolidated, but the NLRB ruled that his failing eyesight, not the blacklist, accounted for his not being rehired.
144. C. J. “Bud” DeBraal [to Rafael Lardizábal], March 4, 1952, and Lardizábal to DeBraal, May 26, 1952, WFMR, box 872, folder 41.
145. Rafael Lardizábal, quoted in SCDP, June 3, 1952. He aired his criticisms over radio station KSIL on June 2, 1952.
146. Ibid. Local 890 did organize a gift drive and Christmas party for the Empire Zinc strikers’ children.
147. SCDP, June 7, 1951.
148. Asarco Local 530 monthly reports, 1945–47, WFMR, box 865, folder 13.
149. Paul B. Sáenz and Angel R. Bustos to Reid Robinson, December 4, 1946, WFMR, box 865, folder 11.
150. Quoted in SCDP, November 10, 1951.
151. White’s replacement, Paul Sáenz, thought little of White’s accounting skills. Apparently White (and, to be fair, his predecessor) never deducted federal withholding or social security from salaries of union employees, and left “a veritable mess” for Sáenz to clean up. See Paul B. Sáenz to Reid Robinson, December 30, 1946, WFMR, box 865, folder 11.
152. Clinton Jencks, interview by author.
153. For one of many examples from Local 890 executive board minutes, see those for February 6, 1948, WFMR, box 868, book 10. This pattern of lively debate continued into the 1950s.
154. Interviews by author of Arturo Flores, Lorenzo Torrez, Virginia Chacón, and Clinton Jencks.
155. A spring 1948 membership drive at Kennecott by Local 890 yielded proportionately more Mexican new members. Of the 361 employees eligible for union membership in March and April 1948, 128 (35 percent) were Mexican and 233 (65 percent) were Anglo. At the end of May, 290 eligible workers still did not belong to the union, of whom 80 (28 percent) were Mexican and 210 (72 percent) were Anglo. See “Eligible workers not in union as of March 1948 at Kennecott, Hurley,” “Eligible workers not in union as of April 1948 at Kennecott, Santa Rita,” “Santa Rita workers eligible for Union not in Union May 25, 1948,” and “Eligible workers not in Union as of May 25, 1948, Hurley,” WFMR, box 870, folder 7. It is unclear if the change over time comes from individuals joining the union or ceasing to be eligible.
156. Asarco seniority list as of May 1, 1949, WFMR, box 870, folder 1; Local 890 petty cash record and membership book, WFMR, box 865, book 2; Asarco Unit meeting minutes, 1949, WFMR, box 868, book 7.
157. Statement of Floyd Bostick on behalf of Local 890, in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Problems in the Metal Mining Industry, 400. From the beginning of the twentieth century, many people have moved to New Mexico for health reasons. Most of the literature on this phenomenon has shown the middle-class origins of the migrants; here we see examples of working-class people taking the same steps.
158. Local 890 became a civil rights and political organization as much as a labor union, a development I analyze in Chapter 4.
159. Arturo Flores, interview by author, and Clinton Jencks, interview by author. No one organized a ladies’ auxiliary, which suggests little attempt to mobilize people beyond the workplace. Carlsbad, located some distance from Grant County, had New Mexico’s only ladies’ auxiliary before Grant County women formed Auxiliary 209 in 1948. See Chapter 4.
160. Santa Rita Local 63 minutes, January 30, 1947, WFMR, box 864, book 2. Reports from the 1941–42 organizing drive reinforce the sense that these organizers came from outside, and that the Grant County drive was considered part of a much larger project.
161. Virginia Chacón, interview by author. Arturo Flores echoed her comments. See Flores interview. (Palomino is a Spanish term for a white horse.)
162. The information for this section comes from Clinton Jencks, interview by author.
163. SLID was associated with the Socialist Party; years later it became the basis for Students for a Democratic Society.
164. Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1990, Sunday, home edition.
165. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union began in the early 1930s as an interracial union affiliated with the Socialist Party. In the sit-down strike, hundreds of farm tenants lined the highway near Sikeston, Missouri, to protest their evictions. See Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, and Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land.
166. Curtis evidently had a misunderstanding with Orville Larson, Mine-Mill vice president for District 2, and Larson fired him from the Silver City position.
167. Clinton Jencks, interview by author.
168. These leadership and stewards’ classes were no small commitment for any miner: one lasted from 9:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. on a Sunday, which meant a full day’s work on top of a normal work week. See Local 890 executive board minutes, February 6, 1948, WFMR, box 868, book 10.
169. Flyer advertising leadership school, February 8, 1948, WFMR, box 870, folder 10.
170. Notes, shop stewards training class, WFMR, box 870, folder 10. This had been the preamble to the WFM’s constitution. Mine-Mill initially dropped it when it reorganized in 1916 but readopted it in 1934. See Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism, 17.
171. Educational materials sent by Graham Dolan to Local 890 and letter from Graham Dolan to Howard Goddard, December 15, 1947, WFMR, box 870, folder 10.
172. Flyer advertising leadership school.
173. Clinton Jencks, interview by author. Yolanda Broyles-González makes a persuasive case that Chicano political theater of the 1960s came out of just this tradition, characterized by a “collective and physical manifestation” of cultural memory in storytelling, dichos, jokes, dance, and other forms of performance. See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 15.
174. Arturo Flores, interview by author.
175. Notes, shop stewards training class. Many grievance records in the WFMR contain these “five-cent notebook” sheets of paper.
176. Local 890 executive board minutes, February 6, 1948, WFMR, box 868, book 10.
177. Ibid., February 23, 1948.
178. Clinton Jencks to Taller de Gráfica Popular, September 29, 1948, WFMR, box 873, envelope 2. These “close ties” also found expression in efforts to ally with Mexican Asarco workers. In 1949, Angel Bustos and Ezekiel Santamaria, Local 890 representatives to the national Asarco Council, called on the council to “work closer with the Mexican workers in the AS&R in Mexico.” See ASR Council minutes, January 30–31, 1949, Omaha, WFMR, box 870, folder 8.
179. C. E. Jencks to University of New Mexico Film Library and Extension Service, August 9, 1949, WFMR, box 873, envelope 2; Local 890 executive board minutes, February 6, 1948, and September 22, 1948, WFMR, box 868, book 10.
180. Cipriano Montoya to Graham Dolan, November 24, 1951, WFMR, box 867, folder 1.
181. Asarco Unit minutes, June 30, 1949, WFMR, box 868, book 7.
182. “Steward’s Outline,” n.d., WFMR, box 870, folder 10.
183. Clinton Jencks, interview by author.
184. “Steward’s Outline.”
185. Arturo Flores, interview by author.
186. Ibid.
187. Ibid.
188. Ibid.
189. Ramón A. Hurtado is listed as having begun work at Kennecott on August 19, 1945, and to have been classified as a pitman on May 1, 1947. See Kennecott seniority list, July 1947, WFMR, box 866, folder 4. Flores himself later had a chance for promotion out of the truck department. This opportunity arose precisely because of union-won seniority and antidiscrimination clauses in his contract, but Flores turned it down—also because of the union. As grievance committeeman for the Santa Rita unit, and as an 890 official, driving a truck was a surefire way to talk to workers in many different parts of the plant.
190. C. D. Smothermon to Clinton Jencks, July 20, 1950, WFMR, box 867, folder 1. Montoya resigned this position after about six weeks, citing his wife’s health. He returned to Grant County and at the time of the Empire Zinc strike presided over Local 890.
191. Arturo Flores, interview by author.
192. Local 890 minutes, September 29, 1951, WFMR, box 868, book 9. This issue later came to a head in the early 1960s, when Al Skinner promised Mexican American supporters that a Mexican American would replace him as District 2 representative; the 1951 convention proceedings show Mexican Americans debating the issue some ten years before. See Maclovio Barraza, interview by Alice M. Hoffman, December 10, 1969, transcript, WFMR, box 950, folder 1.
193. M. E. Travis to C. D. Smothermon, July 30, 1951, WFMR, box 206, folder 10. Travis suggested that Smothermon call a conference of Mexican American unionists in the Southwest, but it is unclear what relation that conference (if it indeed took place) had to the Mexican American caucus at the September 1951 Mine-Mill convention in Nogales.
194. Anita Torrez, interview by author.
195. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
196. Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
197. Anita Torrez, interview by author.
198. Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
199. Clinton Jencks, interview by author; Jencks v. United States, 226 F.2d 540 (5th Cir. 1955).
200. The secrecy surrounding CP membership set the stage for considerable trouble a few years later for Clinton Jencks, when he was convicted of having falsified a Taft-Hartley noncommunist affidavit in 1950. See Chapter 9 and Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 310–11, 336–55.
201. “Steward’s Outline.”
202. SCDP, April 5, 1951.
203. Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1983), 196–97.
204. Cipriano Montoya to Maurice Travis, February 3, 1951, WFMR, box 294, box 13.
205. Open letter from Clinton Jencks to Mine-Mill locals, March 20, 1951, WFMR, box 294, folder 13.
206. Receipts from the Southwestern Food and Sales Co., Inc., for January 8, January 9, and February 1, 1951, WFMR, box 294, folder 11.
207. Mine-Mill report, n.d., WFMR, box 294, folder 13; Anita and Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
208. Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1983), 199.
209. Anita and Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
210. Mine-Mill report, n.d., “Empire Zinc Strike,” WFMR, box 294, folder 13.
211. Letters to the editor, SCDP, April 5, 1951.
1. Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1979), 74. Cargill refers to union meeting minutes for June 12, 1951, in the WFMR, but I could not locate those minutes. My account of the meeting comes from his thesis and subsequent article, Mine-Mill convention proceedings, and interviews I conducted with Aurora Chávez, Anita and Lorenzo Torrez, Virginia Chacón, and Clinton Jencks.
2. Aurora Chávez, interview by author.
3. Anita Torrez, interview by author.
4. Aurora Chávez, interview by author; Ernesto Velásquez, Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1951), 65; Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
5. Juan Chacón, OHALC interview.
6. Anita Torrez, interview by author.
7. Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1979), 74; Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1983), 203; Clinton Jencks, interview by author.
8. Aurora Chávez, interview by author.
9. Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1951), 64.
10. Ibid.
11. In this respect, the Empire Zinc strike was similar to many other such mining conflicts in which women’s participation and the politics of gender proved pivotal, such as the Cripple Creek strikes of 1894 and 1904, the Ludlow strike of 1913–14, and the Bisbee strike of 1917. Women often acted to protect their family and class interests, a topic I pursue more fully below.
12. Penfold, “‘Have You No Manhood in You?,’” 275.
13. Yarrow, “Gender-Specific Consciousness.”
14. Klubock, Contested Communities; Finn, Tracing the Veins.
15. James K. Richardson, Address to 1946 Meeting of New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, reprinted in New Mexico Miner and Prospector, June 1946, 4. Richardson was a labor relations specialist at Kennecott’s Utah operations, and in the early 1950s he was transferred to New Mexico.
16. Ibid.
17. This account comes from the record of an inquest held March 30, 1947, New Mexico State Inspector of Mines Records, box 2, folder 125, NMSRCA.
18. To “bar down” was to loosen and remove the rock likely to separate from the wall; to “timber” was to provide wooden support.
19. Accident report, inquest, Findings on Hearing held by State Mine Inspector, May 8, 1947, New Mexico State Inspector of Mines Records, box 2, folder 127, NMSRCA.
20. Ibid.
21. The funerals of four men killed at U.S. Smelting, Refining, and Mining Company (USSRMC) on March 21, 1947, were conducted by the AHA. See SCDP, March 26, 1947.
22. SCDP, April 9, 1947.
23. See Kessler-Harris, “Providers,” in A Woman’s Wage, and Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. In her most recent work, In Pursuit of Equity, Kessler-Harris has shown that over the twentieth century, men and women have fought for something they understood as “equity” over and above something later feminists would consider “equality.”
24. Empire Zinc negotiation notes, August 29, 1949, WFMR, box 868, book 8.
25. Ernest Rodríguez, handwritten summary of delegation to Santa Fe, [July 6, 1949], WFMR, box 870, “Unemployed” folder.
26. Handwritten lists of unemployed men and their dependents, n.d., WFMR, box 870, “Unemployed” folder.
27. Ibid. All but one of these eighteen veterans had Spanish names.
28. Chino reopened within a year, but Phelps-Dodge did not resume mining for thirty years; in the interim, it leased mine claims to individuals like H. E. McCray.
29. Ray Strickland was the local officer of the State Employment Security Commission, which administered federal and state unemployment benefits and placed unemployed workers in new jobs. In January, 1,866 people applied for nonagricultural work at Strickland’s office in Silver City, but only 147 of them found jobs. By the middle of February, Strickland still had 221 active applications. See SCDP, February 17, 1949.
30. SCDP, June 16, 1949; New Mexico Miner and Prospector, July 1949, 11.
31. SCDP, June 28, 1949; June 29, 1949; New Mexico Miner and Prospector, July 1949, 11.
32. SCDP, June 30, 1949.
33. SCDP, July 13, 1949.
34. SCDP, August 9, 1949. The unemployment rate includes only those people looking for work.
35. John Steelman, Assistant to the President, List of labor market areas of very substantial unemployment, December 30, 1949, Dennis Chávez Papers, box 190, folder 13, CSR.
36. Open letter to New Mexico legislators from Gregorio Mesa, Angel Bustos, and Clinton Jencks, July 16, 1949, WFMR, box 870, “Unemployed” folder.
37. SCDP, June 29, 1949, 1. Two hundred applicants a day flooded the offices.
38. The Unemployed Councils were led by the Communist Party, and the Workers’ Alliances were led by the Socialist Party; the latter organized workers on public relief projects. See Gosse, “‘To Organize in Every Neighborhood.’”
39. New Mexico Employment Security Commission, Thirteenth Annual Report, 1949, New Mexico Supreme Court Law Library State Agency Collection, box 16, folder “Employment Security Commission—Annual Reports, 1946–1950,” 15, NMSRCA.
40. The six men were Gregorio Mesa, Henry Jaramillo, Ernest Trejo, Cipriano Montoya, Ernest Rodríguez, and Clinton Jencks.
41. Ernest Rodríguez, handwritten summary of delegation to Santa Fe, and Clinton Jencks, handwritten notes taken during trip, WFMR, box 870, “Unemployed” folder;
42. Open letter from Local 890’s Unemployment Committee, July 16, 1949, in WFMR, box 870, “Unemployed” folder. Mabry later denied that he had said he was willing to call a special session if three-fifths of the legislature requested it. See State Senator Guido Zecca to Clinton Jencks, July 30, 1949, WFMR, box 870, “Unemployed” folder. Zecca represented McKinley County and suggested that Grant County’s unemployed miners apply for jobs at the Gallup American Coal Company, located in McKinley County.
43. Statement by Governor Thomas J. Mabry, n.d., Governor Thomas J. Mabry Papers, box 6, “Special issues—unemployment 1949–50, correspondence with Clinton Jencks” folder, NMSRCA.
44. Clinton Jencks to Morris Wright, editor of The [Mine-Mill] Union, August 18, 1949, WFMR, box 870, “Unemployed” folder.
45. Local 890 had several ideas for publicizing the union’s view of the unemployment crisis, and the political economy more broadly, at the 1949 Labor Day parade. One parade float would show the union winning benefits, “which are then passed on to the Community,” while the company sent its profits “away to Wall Street.” A second idea connected consumers and workplace conditions—here, speedup and the resulting overproduction. With the mines shown shut down, as they were in 1949, consumers faced “a great need for bathtubs, plumbing, houses, cars, and even kitchen utensils,” all of which were beyond their means. A third float would place a corporation above an Anglo worker and a Mexican worker, each holding a “list of their common needs for food, clothing, [and] housing.” See Clinton Jencks to Research and Education Department, International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, August 23, 1949, WFMR, box 870, folder 10.
46. Most newspaper discussion of veterans presumed that they were men; similarly, the state veterans’ agency estimated a 1956 veteran population of 125,000 “service men and their dependents.” See New Mexico Veterans’ Service Commission, “Report of New Mexico Veterans’ Service Commission.” Interestingly, though, the first “mayor” of Western New Mexico University’s Campus Village, which housed veterans, was a woman. See SCDP, September 22, 1947.
47. There is a growing historical literature that stresses the importance of World War II veterans on the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The G.I. Forum, for example, began in 1948 to secure veterans’ benefits for Mexican Americans. The G.I. Forum spread throughout the Southwest; New Mexico’s 1954 convention anticipated 250 delegates and alternates (Forum News Bulletin, April 1954, 2, WFMR, box 118). But there does not seem to have been a chapter in Grant County—perhaps because Mine-Mill served similar purposes or perhaps because the G.I. Forum was vocally anticommunist and found little support among Mine-Mill members. For example, in 1954, Ed Idar Jr., executive secretary of the American G.I. Forum of Texas, angrily wrote to Mine-Mill’s newspaper, the Union, demanding to be removed from the mailing list of “an organization whose record shows clearly that it is being used by elements whose loyalty is primarily to a foreign power and to a foreign ideology. . . . Our sympathy rests with the group of loyal Americans in the El Paso locals of your union that attempted to wrest control . . . from the tainted leadership” (Ed Idar Jr. to editor, The Union Newspaper, February 2, 1954, WFMR, box 118). For the American G.I. Forum nationally, see Allsup, American G.I. Forum, and Ramos, American G.I. Forum; for the G.I. Forum in Texas, see also Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 279–80. Clinton Jencks was a member of the left-wing American Veterans Committee, which experienced its own battle over communism in 1947. See SCDP, May 14, 1947; Bolte, New Veteran; Moore, “Search for Alternatives”; Saxe, “‘Citizens First, Veterans Second’”; Severo and Milford, Wages of War; and Tyler, “American Veterans Committee.”
48. See Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, for a close analysis of national and international Communist policy in this period.
49. Report of communications and correspondence, Santa Rita Local 63 minutes, February 6, 1947, WFMR, box 864, book 2.
50. Chester R. Brooks, chairman of Mine-Mill’s Kennecott Council, to Kennecott Council locals and delegates, May 8, 1947, WFMR, box 870, folder 2. Brooks specifically told Clinton Jencks, Felipe Huerta, and Brígido Provencio to pass this information on to the membership.
51. Santa Rita Local 63 minutes, July [17], 1947, WFMR, box 864, book 2.
52. Ibid.
53. Santa Rita Local 63 minutes, August [7], 1947, WFMR, box 864, book 2.
54. “The Zero Hour,” New Mexico Miner and Prospector, April 1944, 1.
55. Here I am building on the arguments of Robert Korstad and Zaragosa Vargas, both of whom explicitly connect union organizing by African Americans and Mexican Americans to civil rights activism of the 1940s and 1950s. See Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, and Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights.
56. SCDP, September 11, 1942.
57. SCDP, August 28, 1944. Anchondo belonged to Mexico’s Federación Regional de Obreros y Campesinos and had worked in El Paso as part of the Mexican union’s cross-border organizing in the early 1940s. See Arnold, “Humberto Silex,” 9. The union drive angered Asarco Local 530 member E. A. Dowell, who resented “the dragooning of mine, mill and smelter workers into financing and supporting political candidates and parties that care little or nothing for the rank and file of union members.” A union, in Dowell’s view, should instead “secure better wages and working conditions for its members.” Dowell’s denunciation of Mine-Mill’s political activity, though, seems to have been his tactic to draw attention to the real issue that he cared about: a delay in getting a pay raise that the Nonferrous Metals Commission had granted over the summer. See SCDP, October 16, 1944; for the union’s response, see SCDP, November 3, 1944, and November 6, 1944.
58. The 1948 campaign became a showdown between liberals and leftists within the labor movement and in American political culture more broadly. The CIO insisted that unions support President Truman, while the CP and its supporters backed Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace.
59. Local 890 executive board minutes, January 2, 1948, WFMR, box 868, book 10. Political platform quoted in SCDP, March 3, 1948. That September, the Grant County chapter of the New Party held its founding convention, which nominated a number of union leaders for political office; the statewide New Party convention then nominated them as well.
60. Henry Jaramillo dropped out before the election. See Local 890 executive board minutes, August 30 and October 5, 1948, WFMR, box 868, book 10; and SCDP, September 3, 1948; September, 20 1948.
61. Local 890 executive board minutes, September 22 and September 28, 1948, WFMR, box 868, book 10.
62. SCDP, May 11, 1948.
63. Ibid.
64. SCDP, June 9, 1948.
65. These figures are from SCDP, November 4, 1948, and presumably reflect local reportage. Strangely, an Associated Press report on congressional races (also published in this issue of SCDP) showed a much higher number of voters for Provencio (423) and Jencks (585), while the Associated Press report on state races (published in SCDP, November 5, 1948) did not even mention Chacón or Luján.
66. Wallace activists had also worked the year before through another organization with national aspirations, the Committee to Organize the Mexican People (COMP), whose executive secretary, Isabel Gonzales, organized the Wallace campaign among Mexican Americans and later worked with the Asociación Nacional Mexicana Americana, discussed below. COMP operated out of the same Denver building that housed Mine-Mill’s international, and local COMP committees in July 1947 were clearly tied to Mine-Mill strongholds in Arizona, El Paso, and Grant County. Mine-Mill officers, in fact, constituted almost all of these committees; Albert Muñoz and Arturo López, Mine-Mill activists in Santa Rita, led New Mexico’s only chapter. The strongest committees were in Denver, Pueblo, and Lafayette, Colorado; they drew on Mine-Mill support and ventured into agricultural areas, advocating labor legislation to improve the work and living conditions of sugar beet workers. See Committee for Organizing the Mexican People, Local Committees as of July 1, 1947, and Isabel Gonzales to Albert Muñoz, August 29, 1947, WFMR, box 870, folder 27. The overlapping of membership across organizations suggests both the continuing interest in ethnically based organizations and the difficulties in sustaining them over time. According to historian Mario T. García (Mexican Americans, 200), the Wallace campaign had brought together many leftist Mexican Americans in the Southwest; gathered in El Paso for a conference of “Amigos de Wallace” chapters in October 1948, they decided to reconvene later in order to create a permanent national organization. The story of COMP suggests an earlier set of connections.
67. This example of Mexican Americans running for political office may have encouraged Frank Romero, a small businessman in Central, to challenge incumbent mayor H. L. Barnett in 1952. Romero won that election but probably regretted it the following year, when he was forced to mediate between the Salt of the Earth crew and local Anglos—Barnett included—who were seeking to drive the film crew away.
68. SCDP, May 26, 1944. Another sign of Morales’s standing in Silver City came at the funeral of his sixteen-year-old daughter Dolores. Active pallbearers included Henry Jaramillo and Ray Leon, both Mine-Mill activists; “honorary pallbearers” included former mayor Frank Vesely, Carl Dunifon, and Sixth District Court judge A. W. Marshall. See SCDP, July 7, 1951.
69. The actual role of that bloc, though, was complicated. In 1947, Frank Druley secured the backing of Joe V. Morales, Tony Remigio, and Manuel Valdez, all prominent Democrats. Remigio and Valdez accused Druley’s opponent, Melvin Porterfield, of having “dictated the election board . . . and [failing] to name a single Spanish American.” Perhaps sensing that their support for Druley could backfire if perceived as part of a quid pro quo, Morales took pains to deny “that Spanish-speaking voters were promised a town clerk of their own race, a fire station on Chihuahua hill, manned by Spanish-Americans, and . . . that Mr. Druley had denied service to native people at his restaurant” (SCDP, March 28, 1947). Morales’s disclaimer suggests, first, that Mexican Americans were quite interested in filling political posts from which they were apparently excluded and, second, that this kind of political horse trading might push some Anglo supporters away from Druley. In any case, Porterfield won the election. In 1951, Hal Hammack won the mayoral race in Silver City with the help of the “Spanish-speaking vote,” although, again, the actual role of this vote is hard to assess. Some Mexican Americans may have been lured to Hammack’s side by his advertisement in Spanish, featuring the endorsement of nineteen Mexican American men who declared Hammack “un hombre justo y honrado [que] no tiene prejuicios” (“a just and honorable man who has no prejudices”).
70. Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
71. Mine-Mill activists and other progressives formed ANMA at a meeting in Phoenix in February 1949, timed to coincide with President Lincoln’s birthday. It was most active in California, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas.
72. For information on ANMA, see Urrutia, “Offspring of Discontent,” and Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History, 169–93, and Mexican Americans, 199–227.
73. La Voz de ANMA (Denver), October 1951, WFMR, box 206, folder 11; The [Mine-Mill] Union, February 25, 1952, 6, WFMR, box 324, folder 17; and C. D. Smothermon to Ernesto Velásquez, February 28, 1952, WFMR, box 867, folder 1. Mine-Mill’s support for the boycott angered some auxiliary members in other parts of the country. Mrs. Charles Wadenklee of Avenel, New Jersey, wrote to the union’s newspaper, “If the National Association of Mexican-Americans are so narrow minded that they can’t take a little good natured kidding they shouldn’t tag the name Americans to the end of their name. Judy Canova also kids the hillbilly Americans and they aren’t screaming for revenge. Don’t the Mexican-Americans have any sense of humor at all?” Annie Petek of Helena, Montana, wrote a similar letter. See The [Mine-Mill] Union, February 25, 1952, 6.
74. See Garcilazo, “McCarthyism.” Bert Corona remembers, by contrast, that the Left worked only on behalf of European Americans, not Latinos, in the deportation cases of the late 1940s and early 1950s. See Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History, 119.
75. A Reuben [sic] Arzola was hired as a trackman at Kennecott on February 25, 1947; he does not appear on the 1949 employee list. A Felipe Arzola was later one of the Empire Zinc strikers.
76. ANMA, “Abusos e Injusticia Contra los de Origen Mexicano” (1949), 4, WFMR, box 294, folder 13.
77. SCDP, May 2, 1949. Interior quote is McDonald’s. A Guadalupe Rodríguez was a machine miner at Empire Zinc in 1946.
78. SCDP, May 5, 1949.
79. Notes on Fierro Defense, n.d., WFMR, box 873, envelope 2.
80. SCDP, May 5, 1949.
81. Ibid.
82. ANMA, “Abusos e Injusticia,” 6.
83. Arturo Flores, open letter, June 1, 1949, WFMR, box 873, envelope 3. It is interesting that Flores, who often went by “Art” or “Arthur,” identified himself as “Arturo” in all ANMA business.
84. Lorenzo Torrez estimated ANMA membership by that point at about fifty, although they did not meet regularly. Art Flores, who at that time was working in El Paso, still got bundles of fifty copies each of El Progreso, ANMA’s newspaper, for February through June 1953. See Alfonso Sena to Arturo Flores, August 12, 1953, WFMR, box 867, folder 5; and Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
85. Handwritten notes, [January 1953], WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
86. For more on ANMA in California, see Mario T. García, Memories of Chicano History.
87. Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
88. Ibid.
89. New Mexico’s founding convention of ANMA welcomed the Grant County unemployed caravan to Albuquerque, and its delegates sent its new state executive secretary, Alfredo Montoya, “to consult with high state officials on the unemployed situation.” The state association suggested that Grant County’s miners look for work in Carlsbad, another Mine-Mill stronghold but one in which only 100 of the 2,000 potash miners were Mexican; ANMA planned to connect the issue of unemployment with that of discrimination against Mexicans. See Alfredo C. Montoya, executive secretary of ANMA, to Governor Thomas J. Mabry, September 2, 1949, and minutes, Junta de la Mesa Directiva de ANMA, September 4, 1949, Albuquerque, WFMR, box 870, “Unemployed” folder.
90. Minutes, Junta de la Mesa Directiva de ANMA, September 4, 1949. Torrez also mentioned efforts to desegregate swimming pools and movie theaters, but it is unclear from the context if he was speaking of Grant County’s chapter or of ANMA in general. See Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
91. See J. D., “On Chauvinism against the Mexican-American People”; and Burnhill, “Mexican-American Question”; “Mexican-Americans”; and “Plight and Struggles.”
92. Burnhill, “Mexican-American Question,” 53.
93. Tenayuca and Brooks, “Mexican American Question.”
94. The United Farm Workers of America (UFW) is perhaps the best example of Chicano labor organizing around families; the UFW differed from Mine-Mill in that the industry employed families to perform agricultural work. As Margaret Rose shows, the UFW’s family-based organizing benefited many farmworkers, but the divisions of labor were nonetheless gendered in ways that kept most women from direct leadership. See Rose, “From the Fields to the Picket Lines,” 272, and “Women in the United Farm Workers.”
95. Clinton Jencks, interview by author.
96. See critique of the Equal Rights Amendment in Cowl, “Struggle for Equal Rights for Women.”
97. Cobble, Other Women’s Movement.
98. Engels provided the theoretical base for other Communist considerations of women’s status. One guide to discussing the Woman Question added to Engels some examples from the American experience, among them that “the oppression of Negro women is in many ways qualitatively different from that of white women, not merely quantitatively more intense” (Epstein and Wilkerson, Questions and Answers on the Woman Question, emphasis in the original).
99. Inman, In Woman’s Defense.
100. See Dancis, “Socialist Women in the United States,” 92; Baker, “Women Working for the Cooperative Commonwealth”; and Couturier, “‘Women’s Women.’”
101. Baxandall, “Question Seldom Asked,” 156–57. Kate Weigand, studying Communist women after World War II, criticizes Baxandall for declaring that the party expelled Inman. Weigand found evidence that Inman herself spread the story that she was expelled in order to attack the party and to shore up her own credentials as an independent scholar. Weigand uses this episode, in fact, as part of her larger point that the CP was at least the source, if not the site, of a great deal of feminist discussion. See Weigand, Red Feminism, 28–45.
102. On the influence of such casual discussions, see Baxandall, “Question Seldom Asked,” 159. The voices of some female midlevel leaders also come through in a 1950 Daily People’s World article by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, one of the few high-ranking women in the CP. These women complained about the resistance they encountered from their husbands and about the assumption that their political lives were subordinate to their family lives. See Flynn, “What Do Communist Women Talk About?”
103. Millard, Woman against Myth, 21.
104. Swerdlow, “Congress of American Women,” and Alonso, “Mayhem and Moderation.” The attorney general listed the CAW as a “subversive organization” in 1948, and in 1950 the Justice Department demanded that CAW register with the state as a foreign agent. Rather than risk prison and fines, the CAW disbanded in 1950.
105. Historians Linn Shapiro and Kate Weigand have explored this area of Left and women’s history most thoroughly. See Shapiro, “Red Feminism,” and Weigand, “Vanguards of Women’s Liberation” and Red Feminism.
106. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
107. Local 890 executive board minutes, February 25, 1948, WFMR, box 868, book 10.
108. Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1936), 54–59, 182–83. The Chino locals did not attend this convention because Chino was still shut down.
109. Ora Valentine, chairman, “Report of the Continuations Committee of the Auxiliaries of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers,” Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1941), 415. In 1940, Valentine attended a national CIO convention of auxiliaries where she discovered that women in auxiliaries of the United Mine Workers, the American Newspaper Guild, and the United Auto Workers “had been working years to accomplish this and as yet had not been successful” (ibid.).
110. Ibid., 413–16.
111. Garfield Ladies Auxiliary No. 59, Resolution No. 303, Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1941), 287. Mine-Mill had helped establish the Committee on Industrial Organization in 1935 within the American Federation of Labor, and the following year it and other founding organizations broke from the AFL to form the CIO.
112. Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1940), 372.
113. Mercier, Anaconda, 148–49.
114. Maurice Travis to Ladies Auxiliaries, December 9, 1947, WFMR, box 126.
115. Mercier, Anaconda, 148–49. Mercedes Steedman (“Godless Communists and Faithful Wives)” finds a similar crisis in the 1958 International Nickel Company strike in Sudbury, Ontario. Mine-Mill’s uneven integration of women into the union community, the hardship caused by the strike, and, especially, a powerful anticommunist campaign by the Catholic Church divided strikers’ wives and weakened the union.
116. Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1983), 203.
117. Vorse’s observations are discussed in Yeghissian, “Emergence of the Red Berets,” 1–2. In Women, Community, and the Hormel Strike, Neala Schleuning shows a continuum of women’s actions in the Hormel strike, ranging from the traditional to the militant, with an increase of the latter over time. Lynda Ann Ewen sees women’s actions on their own behalf gradually spilling over into “larger goals”; in 1973–74, the Brookside Women’s Club in Harlan County, Kentucky, started to help other pickets besides the coal miners’ and “developed into a self-conscious women’s organization committed to broader struggle for better living conditions” (Ewen, Which Side Are You On?, 54).
118. Aulette and Mills, “Something Old, Something New,” 254–55.
119. In her otherwise excellent study, Schleuning (Women, Community, and the Hormel Strike) takes as a given a sharp, palpable divide between public and private spheres. Only against this backdrop does she perceive the significance of women’s development into political activists. While it does make the changes over time stand out, this premise is faulty: many of the women in the support group had themselves worked at Hormel. Similarly, Yeghissian’s analysis (in “Emergence of the Red Berets”) of the Women’s Emergency Brigade and Women’s Auxiliary during the 1937 Flint sit-down strike rests on the premise of isolated, apolitical wives, sisters, and daughters who probably unwittingly helped General Motors through their ignorance of trade union principles. The strike, then, forged these women into new, militant, class-conscious viragoes. Yet her evidence erodes this model, as more and more of the women turn out to have been political activists prior to the strike.
120. Schofield, “‘Army of Amazons,’” 691.
121. Murray, “A la jonction du mouvement ouvrier et du mouvement des femmes,” 15–16.
122. Temma Kaplan’s 1982 article on Barcelona food rioters, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action,” has been enormously influential. Traces of her basic argument can be found in most historical accounts of working-class women’s activism.
123. Ewen, Which Side Are You On?, 48.
124. Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort, 5.
125. Baker, “Women in the Ludlow Strike.” I disagree with Priscilla Long’s interpretation of the Ludlow strike. Long suggests that wives developed class consciousness out of their relationships with their husbands; a woman’s “consciousness was that of a miner’s wife; her experience of class oppression was a particularly female one.” She hints at but does not fully explore those aspects of company town life that affected women as workers. See Long, “Women of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Strike,” 81, emphasis in the original.
126. Murray, “A la jonction du mouvement ouvrier et du mouvement des femmes.”
127. Union Worker, January 1951.
128. Virginia Chacón, interview by author. Clinton Jencks confirmed that no one approached Cipriano Montoya about his abusiveness. See Clinton Jencks, interview by author.
1. Dolores Jiménez, interview by author and Sam Sills.
2. Daría Chávez, interview by author, and Anita Torrez, interview by author.
3. Dolores Jiménez, interview by author and Sam Sills.
4. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
5. Henrietta Williams, OHALC interview.
6. SCDP, June 13, 1951.
7. Ibid.
8. For an arrest warrant issued June 15, Anglos Blaine and Hartless could not name the three women charged with assault and battery; Jesús Avalos, by contrast, named three women: Daría Chávez, Anita Torrez, and Eva Becerra. See ibid.
9. Betty Jo [Hartless] Matthews, interview by author; SCDP, May 24, 1949.
10. Letter to the editor from Mrs. C. O. Hartless, SCDP, July 11, 1951.
11. For Franco, see obituary of his mother-in-law, Domitila Morales, SCDP, March 29, 1939. For Avalos, see Local 890 minutes, May 17, 1951, WFMR, box 868, book 9.
12. Local 890 minutes, June 14, 1951, WFMR, box 868, book 9. The picketers allowed salaried employees (management and office staff) and traffic to pass. The company said that “some employees managed to get thru [sic],” a claim that the women dismissed. See SCDP, June 13, 1951; June 14, 1951.
13. SCDP, June 15, 1951.
14. These ideas owe much to Kateri Carmola and Michael Rogin.
15. Virginia Chacón, quoted in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1951), 63.
16. El Paso Herald Post, June 16, 1951.
17. SCDP, June 16, 1951.
18. Ibid.
19. El Paso Herald Post, June 16, 1951.
20. New York Times, June 17, 1951, 26.
21. SCDP, June 16, 1951.
22. Lucy Montoya, quoted in The Union Worker, June 1951, 3.
23. New York Times, June 17, 1951, 26; SCDP, June 16, 1951.
24. New York Times, June 17, 1951; Virginia Chacón, quoted in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1951), 63.
25. SCDP, June 18, 1951.
26. Virginia Chacón, quoted in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1951), 63.
27. New York Times, June 17, 1951.
28. Ibid.
29. SCDP, June 18, 1951.
30. New York Times, June 17, 1951.
31. Ibid., June 18, 1951.
32. Ibid., June 17, 1951.
33. People’s Daily World, June 19, 1951.
34. Anita Torrez, “Class Matters,” panel at “Salt of the Earth” conference.
35. Anita Torrez, interview by author.
36. SCDP, June 18, 1951.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid. SCDP, May 23, 1953, reported that Haugland was elected president of the First Methodist Church’s board of stewards. He had joined the Silver City congregation in 1929.
39. SCDP, June 21, 1951.
40. Filing record, Case No. 12812, New Jersey Zinc Co. v. Local 890 of International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Sixth New Mexico District Court Records, Grant County Courthouse, Silver City, N.M.
41. Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
42. SCDP, July 12, 1951.
43. Ibid.
44. Grant County marriage records for Patricia Capshaw, book 16, record 7513; and Ross Capshaw, book 16, record 7654, Grant County Courthouse, Silver City, N.M.
45. Bonnie May Capshaw Teckemeyer, interview by author.
46. SCDP, July 13, 1951.
47. SCDP, July 20, 1951.
48. Elvira Molano, quoted in SCDP, July 20, 1951.
49. Tomás Carrillo, comments on panel, “Bringing Salt of the Earth Home.”
50. SCDP, August 21, 1951.
51. Local 890 press release, August 21, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
52. SCDP, August 18, 1951; September 5, 1951.
53. Tomás Carrillo, comments on panel, “Bringing Salt of the Earth Home.”
54. SCDP, August 23, 1951.
55. Ibid.
56. Local 890 press release, August 23, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
57. Ibid. The Silver City Daily Press did not identify the shooter but described the same scene: “He shot about five shots, apparently wildly, during the peak of the fracas.” See SCDP, August 23, 1951. Local 890 identified him as Denzil Hartless.
58. Local 890 press releases, August 23 and 25, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1; SCDP, August 23, 1951. SCDP reported that Agustín Martínez was first treated at the Santa Rita Hospital and then transferred to the Veterans’ Administration hospital at Fort Bayard. Yguado was released that day from the hospital, and the other two remained overnight.
59. Local 890, Civil Rights Committee Report, September 20, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 2. Mrs. Clanton was probably the wife of Deputy G. W. Clanton.
60. SCDP, August 23, 1951. The three companies were Kennecott (both Santa Rita and Hurley), Peru, and Asarco.
61. Within a few days, Mine-Mill reached a national agreement with Kennecott, but the other companies held out. Coming as it did in the middle of the Korean War, the national strike angered President Truman, who got a Taft-Hartley injunction against Mine-Mill and thirty-one companies on August 30, 1951, on the grounds that the labor dispute threatened national defense. The injunction prohibited both sides from strikes or lockouts. Yet, despite its apparent evenhandedness, the injunction affected the two sides unequally. Its net effect was to force Mine-Mill copper members back to work, because the injunction did not force the companies to negotiate. Thus the national copper strike ended in victory for the companies. Nevertheless, because the Taft-Hartley injunction concerned only the national copper strike, it had no effect on the Empire Zinc strike, which continued to drag on.
62. Anita Torrez, letter to editor, SCDP, June 16, 1951.
63. Local 890 press release, August 10, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
64. Local 890 press release, July 27, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
65. SCDP, July 21, 1951.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., parenthetical note in original.
68. SCDP, August 8, 1951.
69. Ibid.; Local 890 press release, August 9, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1. In a letter to New Mexico attorney general Joe L. Martínez, detailing all of the union’s complaints about local law enforcement, Local 890 clarified that it was Assistant District Attorney Vincent Vesely who had charged the Juárezes with contributing to juvenile delinquency and that the case would be heard in juvenile court on September 18, 1951. I found no report of this proceeding in the local newspaper. See Cipriano Montoya and Ernesto Velásquez to Joe L. Martínez, September 15, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
70. No one recorded the hearings, but charges were published in the local newspaper.
71. The one woman justice I found was Mrs. J. J. Umscheid. She was appointed justice of the peace in Bayard to finish the term of her husband, who had died, and was later elected to the office in her own right.
72. Jack Miles, another Mine-Mill member, ran for the office and was endorsed by the Mine-Mill locals in 1944.
73. I have not determined exactly how Brewington was denied jurisdiction. In the case of charges against strikebreaker Grant Blaine, Brewington initially heard the complaint but when the ruling was recorded the following month it was in Andrew Haugland’s court. A union letter to New Mexico attorney general Joe L. Martínez mentioned that “Mosely and Capshaw succeeded in disqualifying Brewington, a striker, and moving the case to Haugland’s JP court.” See Cipriano Montoya and Ernesto Velásquez to Joe L. Martínez, September 15, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
74. Ibid.
75. James Woolman eloquently makes this point in “Rough Draft for a New Cold War,” which builds on C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite.
76. SCDP, July 23, 1951.
77. Ibid.
78. SCDP, July 21, 1951.
79. Local 890 press release, July 24, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1; C. B. Ogás, interview by author.
80. SCDP, July 24, 1951.
81. SCDP, June 21, 1951.
82. SCDP, July 24, 1951.
83. Local 890 press release, July 24, 1951.
84. Local 890 telegram to Governor Mechem, July 25, 1951, Dennis Chávez Papers, box 208, folder 9, CSR.
85. Daría Chávez, letter to editor, SCDP, June 16, 1951.
86. Local 890 press release, August 22, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
87. Judge Charles D. Fowler, quoted in Local 890 press release, August 30, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
88. Local 890 minutes, August 22, 1951, WFMR, box 868, book 9.
89. Ibid.
90. Senator James Murray, Washington, to John Clark, Denver, June 25, 1951, WFMR, box 294, folder 1.
91. Stephenson, “Use of Troops in Labor Disputes in New Mexico,” analyzes conflicts in 1919, 1922, 1927, and 1933 and concludes that in each instance troops were sent to break the strike rather than to restore order.
92. SCDP, August 11, 1951.
93. The Silver City Daily Press did not print the resolution when it was passed on June 25, 1951, but did so on July 20, 1951.
94. Gertrude Gibney, letter to the editor, SCDP, July 20, 1951.
95. Resolution of Central businesspeople, printed in SCDP, July 20, 1951.
96. Sullivan earned enough respect from Local 890 members that, five years later, the union declined to endorse for county sheriff one of its own officers, Gregorio Mesa, because Fred Sullivan was also in the race: “For sheriff our local has taken the position of not sponsoring a candidate, being that there are two candidates which our union approves of which will cause anamosity [sic] among our ranks” (Local 890 executive board minutes, February 12, 1956, WFMR, box 869).
97. Local 890 press release, September 21, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
98. 1930 manuscript census.
99. Local 890 press release, September 21, 1951.
100. Local 890 press release, October 12, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1. SCDP also reported that Father Smerke was holding a special mass, though the paper did not include the word “successful.” Women apparently requested the mass of Father Smerke. See SCDP, October 13, 1951.
101. This section is based on my interview with Mr. Ogás.
102. Here Ogás could have been mixing up a couple of incidents, because I never found corroboration for this anecdote. He could have linked the widely publicized presence of Braulia Velásquez’s six-week-old child in jail to Rachel Juárez’s injury by Mosely’s car.
103. SCDP, September 13, 1951.
104. Local 890 press release, September 29, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
105. SCDP, September 12, 1951.
106. Local 890 press release, September 29, 1951.
107. SCDP, September 12, 1951.
108. SCDP, September 27, 1951.
109. Virginia Chacón, interview by author; Local 890 press release, September 29, 1951; SCDP, September 27, 1951. Virginia Jencks was fined $40 and court costs. Justice of the Peace Andrew Haugland “said he would ‘withhold judgment on a jail sentence for good behavior in the future.’” See SCDP, September 27, 1951.
110. Mrs. C. O. [Mary] Hartless, letter to the editor, SCDP, July 11, 1951. Her son, she said, had been drafted and was only trying to make some money before he got his final orders.
111. Betty Jo [Hartless] Matthews, interview by author.
112. Mrs. C. O. Hartless, letter to editor.
113. Betty Jo [Hartless] Matthews, interview by author.
114. Ibid.
115. Conversation with Juanita Escobedo, May 22, 2001, Silver City, N.M.
116. Cecilia Rodríguez Pino, “Children of Salt,” panel at “Bringing Salt of the Earth Home.”
117. SCDP, August 23, 1951.
118. Ibid.
119. SCDP, October 13, 1951; October 14, 1951; October 26, 1951; Ernesto Velásquez, open letter to business and professional people in Grant County, November 3, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
120. SCDP, September 20, 1951.
121. SCDP, September 25, 1951.
122. Bayard Journal, May 25, 1950.
123. SCDP, October 2, 1951; October 3, 1951.
124. Charles J. Smith, letter to the editor, SCDP, September 25, 1951.
125. Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1983), 235.
126. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, 103–13.
127. Mercier, Anaconda, 149–64.
128. The Steelworkers were more successful in the 1960s, after years of government and CIO harassment had so weakened Mine-Mill that it could no longer work effectively on behalf of its members and the Steelworkers could argue that it offered better economic benefits to workers. See Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism, and Keitel, “Merger.”
129. Local 890 press release, October 5, 1951, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1. The reference to Mine-Mill organizing the area must have referred more specifically to amalgamation in 1947, since Mine-Mill was the only union to have organized Asarco.
130. Ibid.
131. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
132. SCDP, July 18, 1951. In this respect, union opponents behaved as had white Cuban nationalists upon hearing Afro-Cuban complaints of discrimination early in the twentieth century. Armed with a color-blind ideology, white Cubans accused Afro-Cubans of racism when the latter tried to draw attention to patterns of political discrimination. See Rebecca J. Scott, “Fault Lines, Color Lines,” 101–3.
133. Lupe Elizado, letter to the editor, SCDP, July 16, 1951.
134. Mrs. Tex Williams, letter to the editor, SCDP, June 29, 1951.
135. Lupe Elizado, letter to the editor.
136. As historian Nancie L. González observed in the 1960s, “Not only are persons in [the working] class more tolerant of recent immigrants from Mexico, but they object less to the term ‘Mexican-American’ when applied to themselves. They recognize the obvious cultural similarities between themselves and those south of the border, and they respect the modern Mexican nation. They are also becoming aware that they share a minority-group status with Mexican-American populations elsewhere—particularly in California and Texas” (González, Spanish Americans of New Mexico, 82).
137. Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1983), 237.
138. Bob Hollowwa to Local 890, March 3, 1952; Hollowwa to Cipriano Montoya, April 23, 1952, WFMR, box 867, folder 1.
139. Cargill, “Empire and Opposition” (1983), 263 n.
140. Local 890 minutes, September 19, 1951, WFMR, box 868, book 9. The minutes say “July 19,” but the content concerns later events.
141. Telegram from Auxiliary 209 to John Clark, September 29, 1951, WFMR, box 294, folder 13.
142. The women’s challenge took place at the same time that Mexican American unionists were demanding a place on the international executive board. See Chapter 3.
143. Frank, “Housewives, Socialists,” 256.
144. Local 890 minutes, January 24, 1952, WFMR, box 868, book 9.
145. SCDP, September 12, 1951.
146. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills. In the contract discussion on January 24, Fred Barreras described an upcoming “trip to San Lorenzo on a pilgrimage[,] where all the Empire Zinc strikers will feel [part of an] honorable union with a clean heart and conscience” (Local 890 minutes, January 24, 1952).
147. Ernesto Velásquez raised $20,280, and the international posted $27,600 in its own behalf. $27,600 came from friends in northern New Mexico: Craig and Jenny Vincent, who owned the ranch where Clinton and Virginia Jencks met up with blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers and discussed producing a feature film about the Empire Zinc strike. (See Chapter 7.) See Local 890 press release, March 19, 1952, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
148. Ibid.
149. Local 890 press release, September 9, 1952, WFMR, box 873, envelope 1.
150. Torres had been a temporary constable in Hanover, but Sheriff Goforth fired him in August 1951 for “failing to do his duty” (SCDP, May 7, 1952).
1. Aurora Chávez, interview by author.
2. Union Worker, January 1951.
3. Aurora Chávez, interview by author.
4. Conversation with Rachel Juárez Valencia, May 7, 2004, Bayard, N.M.
5. Angel Bustos, quoted in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1953), 30.
6. Guillermo “Willie” Andazola, interview by author.
7. Local 890 minutes, June 14, 1951, WFMR, box 868, book 9.
8. Local 890 minutes, October 17, 1951, WFMR, box 868, book 9.
9. See Ulrich, Good Wives.
10. See Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, v–vi, and Boydston, Home and Work, 135.
11. As Patricia Zavella has shown for contemporary Chicana cannery workers, “The decision for a woman to seek work was critical and subject to negotiation between husband and wife” (Zavella, Women’s Work and Chicano Families, 98).
12. Dolores Jiménez, interview by author and Sam Sills.
13. Daría Chávez, interview by author.
14. Josephine and Arturo Flores, interview by author.
15. Census statistics inform us of sex segregation but not ethnic segregation. I relied on qualitative sources, such as oral history interviews and references to women’s work in the local newspapers, to get a sense of ethnic differences in occupations. For information on census classifications, see Bureau of the Census, Two Hundred Years of Census Taking.
16. Dora Gutiérrez Madero, interview by author; Alice Sandoval, interview by author.
17. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
18. Grant County had an unusually large number of automobiles beginning after World War II–3,284 in 1947, in a population of roughly 20,000—but this does not mean that they were available for women to take to work. See Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract Supplement, Items 32–33. Parrish Stage Lines ran buses from Silver City to the distant towns of Deming, Lordsburg, and Hot Springs. But these buses could hardly have served commuters from the nearby mining towns to Silver City, because even though they stopped in these towns, they would get a passenger to Silver City no earlier than 11:30 A.M. See ad for Parrish Stage Lines, SCDP, June 12, 1948.
19. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, 1940, table 23, 990; Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census, 1950, table 43. These figures describe the labor force before and after World War II and cannot, therefore, delineate wartime trends, but they do suggest that even the postwar adjustments did not return women’s labor force participation rates to their prewar levels. Nor can we attribute the increase in women’s labor force participation over that decade simply to the higher unemployment levels of 1940, a depression year, because the census category of “labor force” includes unemployed workers seeking work. The census definition of unemployment poses some interpretive difficulties for women’s labor force participation rates: those people discouraged from looking for work do not appear in these statistics, and it is easy to imagine that women might fall into the category of discouraged potential employees. See Blau and Ferber, Economics of Women, Men, and Work, 281–82.
20. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, table 23, 990; Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census, table 43.
21. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, table 23, 990; Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census, table 43.
22. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, 1930. Population, did not break down county employment figures by sex, so I counted (in the manuscript census) those women employed in three towns: Santa Rita, Hanover, and Central. That year the Census Bureau added “Mexican” to the category of “race or color.” Across the three towns, Mexican women were much more likely to work in service jobs and Anglos were much more likely to work in professions; paid manual labor outside the service sector was uncommon for both groups.
23. Position roster, Santa Rita, July 13, 1944, WFMR, box 864, folder 4. Ten additional women worked at Santa Rita that year, seven as laborers in other departments, and three as janitresses. Women entered mines, mills, and smelters elsewhere in the country during World War II but never to the same extent as in other defense industries. Laurie Mercier argues that “a sixty-year tradition of an exclusively male industry” in Anaconda, Montana, kept down the numbers of women smelter workers there, as did the fears of postwar unemployment in the copper industry, “which had been declining except during the war boom” (Mercier, Anaconda, 72–73). Anaconda Copper and Mine-Mill Local 117 agreed that women smelter employees “had to be Anaconda residents, wives of former smelter workers . . . , and with children or parents to support. Both company and union believed that local women, steeped in the culture that favored male breadwinners, would obligingly return to a prewar economic and social order after the [war].” The women workers were laid off early in 1946. See ibid., 67–68, 73.
24. Huggard, “Environmental and Economic Change,” 157.
25. Dora Gutiérrez Madero, interview by author.
26. Ibid.
27. Santa Rita seniority list, Kennecott Corporation, June 1944, WFMR, box 866, folder 4.
28. Lacking seniority lists or other documentation, I cannot determine the jobs that the other women held.
29. Kirker was identified incorrectly as “Corinne Kirker” in the Silver City Daily Press article that lauded her mine work. See SCDP, December 4, 1942; and Local 604 membership day book, WFMR, box 866.
30. Huggard, “Environmental and Economic Change,” 157.
31. Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census, table 23.
32. 64 percent of all adult women kept house in Grant County in 1940; 61 percent did so in 1950. The percentage of adult women keeping house is even higher when we exclude employed women: 78 percent of all adult women who did not belong to the labor force kept house in 1940 and in 1950. See Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, table 23, and Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census, table 43.
33. SCDP, February 15, 1950.
34. Only nineteen men kept house in 1940, a number representing less than 1 percent of all adult men and just over 1 percent of those men who did not belong to the labor force. In other words, almost 99 percent of the men who were not in the labor force—perhaps because they were unemployed, or because they were unemployable due to disability or age—did not take up housework in place of paid work. This number more than doubled by 1950, but it still represented a tiny proportion of adult men. See Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, table 23, and Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census, table 43.
35. See Jameson, “Imperfect Unions,” and Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action,” for analyses of women’s potentially contradictory experiences in this kind of moral economy.
36. See Boydston, Home and Work, 130–35, for calculations of the cash value of women’s unpaid work in the antebellum Northeast.
37. U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Home Environment, 16–17.
38. Alice Sandoval, interview by author.
39. Bill Wood, interview by author.
40. See advertisement in the Bayard Journal, December 21, 1950, and notice in Local 890’s Union Worker, January 1952, for reference to Ynostroza’s business. The 1950 ad announced that the factory would “be open all day December 23 and 24 to grind masa at any time,” suggesting that women took the masa home and made the tortillas themselves.
41. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 86.
42. Virginia Chacón, interview by author. Some individuals delivered water for a fee, as Juan L. Vera did in Central. See SCDP, May 22, 1951; May 23, 1951.
43. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 87.
44. Ibid.
45. Bill Wood, interview by author.
46. C. B. Ogás, interview by author. This was true of Alice Sandoval’s Santa Rita neighborhood. See Alice Sandoval, interview by author.
47. Matías Rivera, interview by author.
48. Bureau of the Census, County and City Data Book 1952, table 3.
49. Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 17.
50. Bayard Journal, February 8, 1951; February 12, 1951.
51. Ibid., November 9, 1951.
52. Ibid., August 24, 1950.
53. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 93; Matías Rivera, interview by author; Aurora Chávez, interview by author. The percentage of residences wired for electricity grew from 8 in 1907 to almost 35 in 1920.
54. Cowan, More Work for Mother, 94.
55. Anita and Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
56. Albert H. Vigil, interview by author.
57. “Prices, Costs and Standards of Living,” Monthly Labor Review 61 (December 1945): 1220–21.
58. Matías Rivera, interview by author; Bill Wood, interview by author; Ramirez, Remembering Fierro, 26. Note the importance here of children’s labor, which merits considerably more discussion than is possible here.
59. Mining affected housecleaning, too. As Josephine Flores recalled, every blast at Chino made bits of sand and cement trickle down the walls of their home in Santa Rita. See Josephine Flores, interview by author.
60. Matías Rivera, interview by author.
61. Bill Wood, interview by author.
62. Elvira Acuña Ogás, interview by author; Arturo Flores, interview by author. Ogás grew up in Tyrone and appreciated the houses that Phelps-Dodge built there. Flores stated that Santa Rita’s company housing was segregated in terms of quality, as well as in location: the Anglos had all the plumbing.
63. Clark, “Architecture and Town Development,” 51.
64. Ibid., 120–21.
65. SCDP, April 14, 1944; December 11, 1946.
66. SCDP, July 17, 1948.
67. De Luna, “The Mexican American,” 3.
68. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
69. Anita and Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author; Elena and Raymundo Tafoya, interview by author; Clinton Jencks, interview by author.
70. SCDP, April 5, 1951.
71. Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 17.
72. Envelopes of canceled checks, Locals 63, 69, 530, and 890, WFMR, boxes 864, 865, 866, and 884. The SCDP, reporting on a “record pay day” at Nevada Consolidated during the war, commented that most employees “immediately cash their checks either at the [mining] camps or at mercantile establishments there and elsewhere in the course of shopping or payment of personal accounts. The enormous payrolls at the mines are largely spent right here in Silver City and other communities of Grant County” (SCDP, June 25, 1942).
73. SCDP, October 11, 1943.
74. Ernesto Velásquez, quoted in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1951), 68.
75. The Santa Rita Store Company, Kennecott’s company store, was used 230 times to cash checks drawn on the union’s account between 1945 and 1948, more than any other single store in the period. Other local retail stores were used 268 times, and grocery stores and banks 96 times each. See envelopes of canceled checks, Locals 63, 69, 530, and 890, WFMR, boxes 864, 865, 866, and 884.
76. Elena Tafoya, interview by author; Matías Rivera, interview by author. See also Martín, Songs My Mother Sang to Me; Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows; Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners; and Jameson, All That Glitters.
77. SCDP, September 14, 1943; December 20, 1944; September 3, 1946; December 18, 1946; August 12, 1948; August 11, 1949.
78. SCDP, November 7, 1946; December 4, 1946.
79. SCDP, November 7, 1946; November 15, 1946; November 29, 1946. This estimate is based on impressionistic evidence.
80. Dolores Jiménez, interview by author and Sam Sills.
81. SCDP, April 19, 1947; September 11, 1947; May 20, 1948; August 6, 1948; August 10, 1948; September 9, 1948.
82. Dolores Jiménez, interview by author and Sam Sills.
83. SCDP, May 14, 1948; August 30, 1948. Posting bail for Homer McNutt was Lem Watson, the deputy sheriff later involved in the Fierro case.
84. Comment in “Picket Line Chatter,” The Union Worker, June 1951, 3.
85. Hollowwa, Jencks, and Montoya to Travis, Clark, Larson, Wilson, Smothermon, and Dolan re: Empire Zinc strike, etc., August 19, 1951, WFMR, box 294, folder 11.
86. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 64.
87. Dolores Jiménez, comments on panel, “Bringing Salt of the Earth Home.”
88. Ernesto Velásquez, quoted in Local 890 minutes, October 17, 1951, WFMR, box 868, book 9.
89. Ernesto Velásquez, quoted in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1951), 63.
1. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
2. She is still performing, and recently her trio released a CD of New Mexican songs that had been collected by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression.
3. Vincent’s biographical information comes from a conversation with her biographer, Craig Smith, October 22, 2004, and from Nott, “Song of Jenny Vincent.”
4. Sylvia Jarrico, OHALC interview. The ranch also attracted the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and FBI harassment of ranch visitors forced the Vincents to sell the property in 1954.
5. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
6. Deborah Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” in Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 108; Sylvia Jarrico, OHALC interview.
7. Sylvia Jarrico, OHALC interview.
8. Many of Mine-Mill’s national officers already knew the members of Jarrico’s film company, Independent Productions Corporation, and the attorneys representing Mine-Mill and IPC—Nathan Witt in New York and Charles Katz in Los Angeles, respectively—were colleagues on a first-name basis.
9. I take this up in Chapter 9.
10. Sylvia Jarrico, OHALC interview.
11. Paul Jarrico, quoted in Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” 96.
12. Communist Party organizations on the local level were generally called “clubs” or “cells”; I use “clubs” because “cells” has a tinge of conspiracy to it, and these groups in Hollywood were hardly conspiratorial.
13. Cogley, Report on Blacklisting.
14. The term “talent branch” refers to the organizations of people in the arts.
15. Paul Jarrico, interview in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, 332.
16. Ibid.
17. See Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, for details on Hollywood unionism.
18. Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 56.
19. Cogley, Report on Blacklisting, 34–35.
20. Sonja Dahl Biberman, quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 81.
21. On the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s, see Isserman, Which Side Were You On?; Brown et al., eds., New Studies; Cochran, Labor and Communism; Keeran, Communist Party; Levenstein, Communism, Anticommunism, and the CIO; and Klehr, Heyday of American Communism.
22. Transcript of Paul Jarrico’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, April 13, 1951, Washington, D.C., Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, box 53, folder 6, SHSWA.
23. Quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 301.
24. Ibid.; transcript of Paul Jarrico’s testimony before HUAC. Buhle and Wagner (Radical Hollywood, 179) state that Jarrico joined the Young Communist League at UCLA in 1930.
25. Quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 179.
26. Sylvia Jarrico, OHALC interview.
27. Ibid. I analyze this periodical in the context of Communist cultural politics in Chapter 8.
28. Ibid.
29. Quoted in Ceplair, “Michael Wilson,” 481. His paternal grandfather had been president of the Southern Baptist Convention. See Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 226.
30. Michael Wilson’s wife, Zelma, was Sylvia Jarrico’s sister. She was an architect at a time when that profession included almost no women.
31. Quoted in Ceplair, “Michael Wilson,” 481.
32. Ceplair, “Michael Wilson,” 481; Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 227.
33. Ceplair, “Michael Wilson,” 481; Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 227. His wife spent the war years working in a defense plant.
34. Sondergaard, “Artist and Man,” 18.
35. On the board of review and its contradictory position as a “censorship organization that opposed censorship,” see Budd, “Film Censorship and Public Cultures.”
36. Named for its director, Will Hays, who was hired by the MPPDA.
37. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America, 173–74.
38. Randall, “Censorship,” 432. In a case involving exhibition of Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle, the Supreme Court held that films were “a significant medium for the communication of ideas” and thus entitled to First Amendment protection. See Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495, 501 (1952).
39. Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 10.
40. Huettig, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry, 63, 84. United Artists, formed in 1919 by Hollywood stars Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and producer D. W. Griffith, was a distribution company for the films produced by its members.
41. Ibid., 2–6. The studios were forced to divest themselves of movie chains on antitrust grounds following a 1948 Supreme Court decision. See United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948).
42. Donald Ogden Stewart, quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 16.
43. Screenwriters tried to organize a labor union in the early 1930s but were effectively stalled by company unions backed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Academy included producers, actors, directors, writers, and technicians, and it projected the image of a unified Hollywood that masked the substantial divisions among groups. But by the end of the decade, talent guilds protected screenwriters, directors, and actors from the most outrageous violations of workers’ rights.
44. Michael Wilson earned a credit for a “script contribution” to It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), although he did a great deal of the work polishing the script; Dalton Trumbo, who became one of the Hollywood Ten, received no credit for his work on the script.
45. Adrian Scott, “You Can’t Do That,” 327–28.
46. Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 111–53.
47. Cogley, Report on Blacklisting, 11. The Fund for the Republic was a liberal organization founded by former Yale Law School dean Robert Maynard Hutchins to protect civil liberties.
48. The nineteen were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Bertolt Brecht, Lester Cole, Richard Collins, Edward Dmytryk, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Lewis Milestone, Samuel Ornitz, Larry Parks, Irving Pichel, Robert Rossen, Adrian Scott, Waldo Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. The majority were screenwriters. Parks was an actor, Adrian Scott was a producer, and Biberman, Dmytryk, Milestone, Pichel, and Rossen were directors.
49. Thomas would later be convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to the same prison that housed two of the Hollywood Ten.
50. Quoted in Cogley, Report on Blacklisting, 10.
51. Ibid., 11.
52. Herbert Biberman, statement during the second week of HUAC hearings, October 1947, Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, “Speeches—HUAC and Hollywood Ten,” box 25, folder 2, SHSWA.
53. Herbert Biberman, prepared statement before the House Un-American Activities Committee, October 1947, Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, “Speeches—HUAC and Hollywood Ten,” box 25, folder 2, SHSWA.
54. The Hollywood Ten were Bessie, Biberman, Cole, Dmytryk, Lardner, Lawson, Maltz, Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Trumbo.
55. Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1952, 5.
56. Quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 331.
57. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, xiv–xv.
58. Press release, June 19, 1950, Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, “Speeches—HUAC and Hollywood Ten,” box 25, folder 2, SHSWA.
59. Ibid.
60. Quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 367.
61. In 1952, Mine-Mill would experience this kind of repression as well, and the following year Clinton Jencks would be convicted of perjuring himself when he signed a Taft-Hartley affidavit in 1950. See Chapter 9.
62. Transcript of Paul Jarrico’s testimony before HUAC, April 13, 1951.
63. Daily People’s World, March 11, 1953, 3.
64. The Bridge on the River Kwai won the 1957 Academy Award for best screenplay. The award, however, went to Pierre Boulle, who had written a first version in French. Although Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman, who wrote the English screenplay, received posthumous Oscars in 1984, it took another thirteen years for their names to be restored to the actual screen credits. Wilson also received a posthumous Oscar nomination in 1995 for Lawrence of Arabia.
65. Peter Biskind analyzes On the Waterfront and other films from the 1950s in Seeing Is Believing. See also Victor Navasky’s Naming Names on Kazan’s decision to inform on Communists.
66. Paul Jarrico, quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 416–17.
67. Paul Jarrico, commenting in the documentary film A Crime to Fit the Punishment.
68. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 31.
69. Independent Productions Corporation, Certificate of Incorporation, September 4, 1951, Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, box 51, folder 11, SHSWA. The board of directors included Lazarus and attorney Katherine Sims.
70. New York Times, March 27, 1953.
71. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 32.
72. Maurice Travis informed the Mine-Mill executive board that IPC had $100,000. See memo from Travis to Mine-Mill international executive board, June 23, 1952, Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, box 52, folder 7. When Lazarus appeared before HUAC on March 26, 1953, he stated that IPC had $5,000 in capital stock, which he owned, and another $90,000 in promissory notes from “a lot of people” (New York Times, March 27, 1953).
1. Henrietta Williams, OHALC interview.
2. Michael Wilson, quoted in Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 38.
3. Henrietta Williams, OHALC interview.
4. Clinton Jencks, OHALC interview.
5. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 39.
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Wilson, “Outline for The Woman Question,” [December 1951], Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, box 17, folder 5, SHSWA. The lead female character in the draft is named China, possibly referring to the Chino copper mine.
8. Clinton Jencks, OHALC interview.
9. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
10. Lorenzo Torrez, quoted in Tom Miller, “Salt of the Earth Revisited,” 32.
11. Tom Miller, “Salt of the Earth Revisited,” 32.
12. Michael Wilson, quoted in Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 40.
13. Maciel, “Los desarraigados,” 165–66. According to the movie listings in the Silver City Daily Press, movie theaters in Silver City and Santa Rita regularly showed Mexican movies in the 1940s and 1950s, usually one or two a week.
14. Clinton Jencks, OHALC interview.
15. Ibid.
16. Michael Wilson, quoted in Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 40–41.
17. Ibid., 40.
18. Virginia Chacón, interview by author; Anita and Lorenzo Torrez, interview by author.
19. Herbert Biberman, report to IPC, [1951], 2, Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, box 17, folder 2, SHSWA.
20. Ibid., 1.
21. Ibid., 2.
22. See Chapter 4 for analysis of the Woman Question in Communist theory and practice.
23. Deborah Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” in Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 102, 107. Rosenfelt suggests that the Hollywood clubs were more likely than others to discuss the Woman Question and its personal and political dimensions.
24. Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood; Wagner and Buhle, Radical Hollywood and Hide in Plain Sight. The dozens of interviews by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle for Tender Comrades confirm this assessment.
25. Quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 302.
26. Cogley, Blacklisting in Hollywood, 43.
27. Maltz, “What Shall We Ask of the Writers?”
28. Jerome, “Negro in Hollywood Films.”
29. Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 264.
30. Isidor Schneider to Albert Maltz, February 6, 1946, cited in ibid.
31. Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 265.
32. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 31–32.
33. Quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 320.
34. Quoted in ibid., 301.
35. Michael Wilson, speech delivered at “A Salute to John Howard Lawson,” November 12, 1955, quoted in ibid., 299.
36. Buhle and Wagner dismiss “democratic humanism” as a politically necessary “smokescreen or evasion” to fend off anticommunist attacks, but I think it was also a means of maneuvering within CP cultural theory.
37. Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 275–76.
38. Ibid., 282–83.
39. Ibid., 284–86. By contrast, Lary May interprets the wartime collaboration of radicals with the Office of War Information as a sign of capitulation to patriotic imperatives, which ultimately undermined any democratic promise in Hollywood films. See May, Big Tomorrow, 141–48.
40. Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, 292–300.
41. Jarrico, “Evil Heroines of 1953.”
42. Buhle and Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight, 130.
43. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture.
44. Ibid., 115–16.
45. Herbert Biberman, Report to IPC, [1951], 2–4.
46. Robin D. G. Kelley discusses this case at length in Hammer and Hoe, 78–91. The Supreme Court twice reversed convictions, but only in 1937 did the State of Alabama release five of the men. In the 1940s, three more were freed and the ninth escaped to Michigan.
47. Herbert Biberman, Report to meeting of Independent Productions Corporation, March 22, 1952, 5, Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, box 17, folder 2, SHSWA.
48. Ibid., ellipses his.
49. Ibid.
50. On the Negro Question in the CP, see Naison, Communists in Harlem; Gerald Horne, “The Red and the Black: The Communist Party and African-Americans in Historical Perspective,” in Brown et al., eds., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, 199–238; and Kelley, Hammer and Hoe.
51. See comments on the party’s drive to eliminate white chauvinism in Healey and Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers; Dennis, Autobiography of an American Communist; and Kelley, Hammer and Hoe.
52. Cripps and Culbert, “Negro Soldier,” 123.
53. Charles Champlin, “Life After ‘Frank’s Place,’” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1988, calendar section, part 6.
54. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 46.
55. Biberman to Maurice Travis, August 7, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
56. Biberman, notes, [June 1952], WFMR, box 129, folder 8, “Salt.” Biberman’s comments also appear in the memorandum Maurice Travis sent to the Mine-Mill executive board, outlining Biberman’s proposal. See Memorandum from Maurice Travis to executive board re: Film Entitled “Salt of the Earth,” June 23, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
57. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 43–44.
58. Ibid., 44.
59. Ibid., 54; Sandoval T., Mexikos Esperanza, 16–25.
60. Biberman to Maurice Travis, September 14, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
61. Ibid.; Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” in Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 129.
62. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 47.
63. Herbert Biberman to Maurice Travis, December 7, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” Folder.
64. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 47. Acosta went on to perform in B-grade movies and television.
65. Virginia Chacón, interview by author; SCDP, November 4, 1948.
66. Sonja Dahl Biberman, OHALC interview.
67. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 71.
68. Sonja Dahl Biberman, OHALC interview.
69. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 72.
70. Ibid., 71.
71. Ibid., 73.
72. Eventually Biberman came to admire Chacón’s performance. While editing the film, he wrote to Maurice Travis: “That man Chacon is just incredible—the color, the variety, the authority!” See Biberman to Maurice Travis, April 20, 1953, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
73. Juan Chacón, OHALC interview.
74. Biberman, Report to IPC [1951], 2.
75. Biberman to Maurice Travis, June 16, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
76. Clinton Jencks later commented that Biberman “over-romanticized some things. . . . [S]ometimes I winced as I read” Biberman’s memoir. See Clinton Jencks, OHALC interview.
77. Angie Sánchez and Virginia Chacón, OHALC interview.
78. Two women I interviewed believed that the story was based on them. Sonja Dahl Biberman thought that the character was a composite: “I don’t think there was any one woman, and yet, each one had so much of her particular point of view, or her particular level of understanding. Her particular background would bring her own contribution” (Sonja Dahl Biberman, OHALC interview).
79. Angie Sánchez and Virginia Chacón, OHALC interview.
80. Biberman to Maurice Travis, July 23, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
81. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 65–66; Jencks, interview by Sam Sills. The Rockwell brothers were itinerant miners who hired on to sink shafts—very dangerous, skilled work. They were pro-union but did not belong to Local 890 because they worked outside its bargaining unit.
82. Sonja Dahl Biberman and Edward Biberman, OHALC interview.
83. Paul Jarrico to Nathan Witt, December 20, 1952, Clinton Jencks Papers, box 24, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colo. The original signatories were to be Herbert Biberman and Paul Jarrico, but Sonja Dahl Biberman replaced her brother-in-law even though he was still in the area.
84. Sonja Dahl Biberman and Edward Biberman, OHALC interview.
85. IPC felt its primary connection and obligation was to the people of Grant County, and this led to some difficulty with the international union. Formal contract negotiations snagged on the distribution of profits. IPC and Mine-Mill agreed that 5 percent of the profits would go to the union, but it became clear in September 1952 that the “union” meant different things to IPC and Mine-Mill. IPC intended that Local 890 should receive the profits, but the Mine-Mill office in Denver assumed that the profits would benefit the union as a whole, since the contract would be signed by the international. Ultimately they compromised, with the 5 percent designated for an Empire Zinc Defense Fund. See Biberman to Maurice Travis, October 14, 1952; Charles Katz to Nathan Witt, September 17, 1952; and Witt to Katz, September 19 and October 15, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
86. Jules Schwerin, “On Location,” in Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 178.
87. Ibid., 177.
88. Biberman, notes, [June 1952].
89. Jules Schwerin, “On Location,” 178.
90. Juan Chacón, “Union Made,” in Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 181–82.
91. Clinton Jencks, OHALC interview.
92. Schwerin, “On Location,” 177.
93. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
94. Chacón, “Union Made,” 182.
95. Clinton Jencks, OHALC interview.
96. Schwerin, “On Location,” 177.
97. Willie Andazola, interview by author.
98. Rachel Juárez Valencia, comments on panel, “Bringing Salt of the Earth Home.”
99. Sylvia Jarrico, quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 418.
100. Becca Wilson and Rosanna Wilson Farrow, comments on panel, “Bringing Salt of the Earth Back Home.”
101. “Paul Perlin,” handwritten notes, WFMR, box 129, folder 6.
102. “Irving Hentschel,” handwritten notes, WFMR, box 129, folder 6.
103. The Union Worker, January 1952, 2. The nursery would initially be for union members but would eventually “extend to cover the needs of all the mining area.” Mariana Ramírez and Carrie Gonzales were designated the leaders of this project.
104. Virginia Jencks to Michael and Zelma Wilson, March 6, 1952, quoted in Lorence, Suppression of “Salt of the Earth,” 43.
105. Virginia Jencks to Mike Wilson, Zelma Wilson, and Sylvia Jarrico, February 24, 1952, quoted in ibid., 41.
106. Lorence, Suppression of “Salt of the Earth,” 41.
107. Henrietta Williams, OHALC interview.
108. Ibid.
109. Clinton Jencks, OHALC interview.
110. Chacón, “Union Made,” 180.
1. SCDP, February 24, 1953.
2. New York Times, February 25, 1953, 22.
3. Ibid., February 13, 1953, 8.
4. Biberman, Salt of the Earth, 82. Members of the garden club included the wife of Carl Elayer, onetime superintendent of Asarco’s Groundhog Mine, Republican leader, and owner of his own company by 1953. See SCDP, February 6, 1950.
5. Elizabeth Kerby, “Violence in Silver City,” 8.
6. Biberman asked for Mine-Mill’s opinions on how best to “address the local authorities in Bayard concerning the use of public thoroughfares and streets.” This was, he said, “a pretty crucial question and I would not like to make any initial blunders” (Biberman to Maurice Travis, September 14, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder).
7. Tom Miller, “Salt of the Earth Revisited,” 33. Matthews defeated Leslie Goforth in the 1952 sheriff’s election.
8. Ibid.
9. June Kuhlman to E. T. “Buck” Harris, January 28, 1953, and Kuhlman to “Dear Sir,” January 22, 1953, in Screen Actors Guild Archives, Los Angeles, cited in Lorence, Suppression of “Salt of the Earth,” 78.
10. Lorence, Suppression of “Salt of the Earth,” 79.
11. Ibid.
12. Leroy B. Bible to Senator Dennis Chávez, February 17, 1953, Dennis Chávez Papers, box 208, folder 9, CSR. Bible wrote Chávez at the request of their “mutual friend, Commander J. F. Foy.” This was probably Jack Franey Foy, District Attorney Tom Foy’s brother.
13. Leroy B. Bible, telegram to Senator Dennis Chávez, February 23, 1953, Dennis Chávez Papers, box 208, folder 9, CSR.
14. Senator Dennis Chávez to Manager, Radio Station KSIL, Silver City, February 25, 1953, and handwritten note on copy of letter from Senator Dennis Chávez, Washington, to Leroy Bible, Fort Bayard, February 24, 1953, Dennis Chávez Papers, box 208, folder 9, CSR.
15. New York Times, February 27, 1953, 6.
16. Rosaura Revueltas, “Reflections on a Journey,” in Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 175.
17. SCDP, February 26, 1953.
18. SCDP, February 24, 1953.
19. SCDP, February 25, 1953.
20. SCDP, February 27, 1953; New York Times, March 1, 1953, 14.
21. New York Times, March 1, 1953, 14. Protest in Mexico drew on recent criticisms of Hollywood’s domination over the Mexican film industry. For an insightful analysis of the relationships among Hollywood, the Mexican film industry, and the Mexican government, see Fein, “From Collaboration to Containment.” In the end, the Hollywood actors were permitted to continue their work in Mexico.
22. Revueltas, “Reflections on a Journey,” 176.
23. Ibid.
24. New York Times, March 1, 1953, 14. Thomason ruled at a habeas corpus hearing on March 3 that the district immigration director “was within his rights in denying her bond” (New York Times, March 4, 1953, 23).
25. New York Times, March 8, 1953, 86.
26. SCDP, February 27, 1953.
27. There is one scene, for instance, when Esperanza knocks a gun out of the hand of a deputy, and this Esperanza was played by Torrez’s sister.
28. Close-ups of Revueltas at the end of the film were shot in Mexico.
29. Larry Martin, quoted in Kerby, “Violence in Silver City,” 8. Among the group of men who confronted the crew in front of the Central post office were Franey Foy and H. L. Barnett. Barnett had recently lost the mayoralty to Romero.
30. SCDP, March 3, 1953.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.; El Paso Herald Post, March 4, 1953, 1.
34. SCDP, March 3, 1953.
35. Ibid.
36. El Paso Herald Post, March 4, 1953, 1.
37. SCDP, March 4, 1953.
38. Ibid.; New York Times, March 5, 1953, 20.
39. Kerby, “Violence in Silver City,” 10.
40. SCDP, March 4, 1953.
41. New York Times, March 8, 1953, 86.
42. SCDP, March 4, 1953. For a different take on ethnic labels, see the comments by teenager Lupe Elizado during the Empire Zinc strike in Chapter 5.
43. Kerby, “Violence in Silver City,” 10.
44. Ibid.
45. Nancie L. González, Spanish Americans of New Mexico, 78.
46. The Union (Bayard, N.M.), n.d., Clinton Jencks Papers, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colo.
47. Statement of Revs. John P. Linnane, Francis Smerke, Pedro Ruiz, and Henry Saxon, quoted in SCDP, March 4, 1953.
48. Lorence, Suppression of “Salt of the Earth,” explains this process in more detail, using many of the same sources that I have consulted.
49. See Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood.
50. Herbert Biberman to Maurice Travis, June 16, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
51. Biberman, notes, [June 1951], WFMR, box 129.
52. Biberman to Travis, October 14, 1952, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
53. Ibid., ellipsis his.
54. Paul Jarrico to Nathan Witt, December 20, 1952, Clinton Jencks Papers, box 24, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colo.
55. IPC Distributors, Inc., “Organizational Steps to Be Taken with Regard to Showing ‘Salt of the Earth,’” Biberman-Sondergaard Papers, box 17, folder 2, SHSWA.
56. Ibid.
57. Juan Chacón, open letter published in SCDP, August 3, 1953.
58. Herbert Biberman to Travis, March 26, 1953, WFMR, box 119, “Salt of the Earth” folder.
59. “Summary Production Costs” and “Detailed Production Costs,” memos accompanying letter from Kevin Smith to Nat Witt, February 9, 1953, Clinton Jencks Papers, box 24, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder, Colo.
60. U.S. Congress, Senate, Hearing on Communist Domination.
61. At its 1952 convention, the Mine-Mill delegates passed a resolution condemning McCarran’s efforts to “bust the union” by calling it Communist-dominated. See New York Times, September 12, 1952, 45.
62. Victor Navasky analyzes this ritual in Naming Names, as does Ellen Schrecker in Many Are the Crimes.
63. Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism, 234–35. Wilson opposed Mine-Mill leadership but recognized the critical need for Alabama secessionists to include black people. Local leaders evidently disliked his racial policies, for they dismissed Wilson and hired Van Jones “with the understanding that the Steelworkers would be a white union” (ibid., 235, italics his).
64. U.S. Congress, Senate, Hearing on Communist Domination, 6.
65. Ibid., 26–30.
66. Ibid., 114.
67. Ibid., 225.
68. Ibid., 252.
69. Ibid., 2.
70. Ibid., 158.
71. Ibid., 261.
72. Ibid., 291.
73. Ibid., 170.
74. Ibid.
75. New York Times, December 30, 1952, 5.
76. Richard Berresford testimony, House Committee on Education and Labor, March 16, 1953, quoted in Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 343.
77. Jencks first filed a noncommunist affidavit in 1949, and by the time of Berresford’s testimony the statute of limitations had expired for prosecuting him for perjury in connection with that affidavit. The Justice Department charged him instead with falsifying a second affidavit signed in April 1950.
78. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
79. Schrecker, “McCarthyism and the Labor Movement,” 151–52.
80. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 342.
81. Ibid., 342–43.
82. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
83. New York Times, April 22, 1953, 21.
84. SCDP, June 1, 1953.
85. SCDP, January 13, 1954.
86. SCDP, January 14, 1954.
87. SCDP, January 19, 1954.
88. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills. In Jencks’s opinion, this rule and the procedure for upholding it were evidence of the union’s democratic structure: union men settled disagreements internally and could not be “railroaded” (ibid.).
89. Ibid. Bill Upton, who had been mayor of Bayard during the strike, appeared at the trial as president of Bayard’s Grant County Savings Bank. Upton admitted disliking Jencks, but his testimony was limited to confirming Jencks’s signature on the Taft-Hartley affidavit; he was not asked to confirm or deny Jencks’s Communist ties. See SCDP, January 12, 1954.
90. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
91. See Matusow, False Witness, for a full account of his transformation from Communist to informer to professional witness.
92. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
93. Jenny Vincent, quoted in Nott, “Song of Jenny Vincent,” 38, and Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 312.
94. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 342.
95. New York Times, December 30, 1952, 5.
96. Clinton Jencks, quoted in Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 348, emphasis in the original.
97. Jencks v. United States, 353 U.S. 657 (1957), was a landmark decision granting defense attorneys access to FBI reports. It later played a minor role in the Watergate prosecutions. See New York Times, July 28, 1973, 10.
98. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
99. Ibid.
100. Clinton Jencks, interview by author. The phrase was a play on the Communist term “socialism in one country.”
101. Clinton Jencks, interview by Sam Sills.
102. Clinton Jencks, quoted in Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 354.
103. Clinton Jencks, interview by author. See also Jencks, Men Underground.
104. Albert Millán, comments on panel, “Bringing Salt of the Earth Home.”
105. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
106. Jenny and Craig Vincent, quoted in SCDP, December 11, 1953. Predictably, the Silver City Daily Press mentioned the fact that the San Cristóbal ranch “lies just 90 miles from Los Alamos, top-secret atomic research center.” Craig Vincent also faced contempt of court charges for refusing to give pretrial evidence in Clinton Jencks’s case; those charges were dropped on March 8, 1954. See SCDP, March 10, 1954.
107. Jenny Vincent, quoted in Nott, “Song of Jenny Vincent.”
108. Virginia Chacón, interview by author.
1. Michael Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 80–82, 90.
2. Henrietta Williams, OHALC interview.
3. Deborah Rosenfelt, “Commentary,” in Wilson, Salt of the Earth, 143.
4. Dolores Jiménez, interview by Sam Sills and author.
5. SCDP, July 26, 1961.
6. Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1961.
7. SCDP, August 25, 1961.
8. Ibid. Two of the Montoyas’ children—María, fourteen, and José, thirteen—took the stand to refute their father. According to the Los Angeles Examiner (August 26, 1961), they “said their mother encouraged them to attend church and sometimes took them there herself.” Feliciana Montoya’s mother, Dolores Doñez, moved to Los Angeles to take care of the couple’s children, who were living with Feliciana’s brother, Max Doñez. (He had been an Empire Zinc striker and was now a Los Angeles postal clerk.) See SCDP, July 26, 1961.
9. Aurora Chávez, interview by author.
10. Angel Bustos, quoted in Mine-Mill Conv. Proc. (1953), 30.
11. Guadalupe Cano, panel, “Bringing Salt of the Earth Home.”
12. In her study of the United Farm Workers, Margaret Rose similarly finds that women’s union participation did not fundamentally change gender relations in families, in the UFW, or in the fields. See Rose, “Women in the United Farm Workers.”
13. Only in Sudbury, Ontario, did the local reject the merger and remain a Mine-Mill local.
14. Higgins brought his complaint to the New Mexico Fair Employment Practices Commission, which ordered Kennecott to stop its segregation of housing, payroll numbers, and washrooms. Kennecott complied and told its employees that future housing assignments would be made “regardless of the applicant’s racial extraction” (New Mexico Fair Employment Practices Commission, “Seventh Annual Report,” 4–8).
15. Mine-Mill members, including Asarco employee and Salt of the Earth costar Floyd Bostick, and companies spoke at congressional hearings on the 1953–54 lead-zinc crisis. See Problems in the Metal Mining Industry.
16. Pattern bargaining was a practice established by industrial unions in the 1940s whereby a contract won at one major company would set the pattern for contracts in other companies within the same industry. It was the norm for the period 1950–80, and its destruction was part of the antilabor offensive of the Reagan era. See Rosenblum, Copper Crucible.
17. In the 1990s, PD managed to decertify Chino’s Machinists, Pipefitters and Carpenters, Boilermakers, and Office Workers, but the Steelworkers and Electrical Workers have survived.
18. The Santa Rita mine and Hurley smelter closed down in 2002, when the price of copper dropped to 72 cents a pound. Chino then discovered that some of the tailings (waste) at Hurley, dating from the 1910s and 1920s, had enough copper left in it to process, and in 2003 the company began hauling it to Santa Rita for leaching. When copper prices rose to $1.23 a pound in early 2004, the Santa Rita mine and concentrator were reopened, but the Hurley smelter remained closed.
19. The phrase is the title of Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner’s study of the effect of blacklisted artists on the movies and television, Hide in Plain Sight.
20. Movies include A Crime to Fit the Punishment, One of the Hollywood Ten, and Memorias de Sal; the opera is Esperanza!, which premiered in Madison, Wis., in 2001.