In 1950, Mexican American miners went on strike for fair working
conditions in Hanover, New Mexico. When an injunction prohibited
miners from picketing, their wives took over the picket lines--an
unprecedented act that disrupted mining families but ultimately
ensured the strikers' victory in 1952. In
On Strike and on
Film, Ellen Baker examines the building of a leftist union that
linked class justice to ethnic equality. She shows how women's
participation in union activities paved the way for their taking
over the picket lines and thereby forcing their husbands, and the
union, to face troubling questions about gender equality.
Baker also explores the collaboration between mining families and
blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers that resulted in the controversial
1954 film
Salt of the Earth. She shows how this
worker-artist alliance gave the mining families a unique chance to
clarify the meanings of the strike in their own lives and allowed
the filmmakers to create a progressive alternative to Hollywood
productions. An inspiring story of working-class solidarity,
Mexican American dignity, and women's liberation,
Salt of the
Earth was itself blacklisted by powerful anticommunists, yet
the movie has endured as a vital contribution to American
cinema.