Hollywood has done films about activists using collective action to pursue a goal before. The latest that I can remember is Milk and Iron Jawed Angels. Most films made about the civil rights movement cannot avoid the topic at all, so there's Malcolm X and Rosa Parks. But Hollywood is way more drawn to David and Goliath stories, that ethos that individual acts of resistance can bring down entire evil companies/empires/etc. So we have tons of action movies in which some guy runs around with guns blazing and or superpowers and saves the world from evil and gets the girl as a reward. (Bourne Identity, James Bond, every Sylvester Stallone Film EVAR, most Arnold Schwartznegger films, most superhero films, (though X-men could be said to grow into their own version of collective action.:) Or we get some crusading journalist like Erin Brockovich or lone man or woman who grabs a lawyer and goes to court like in North Country and Mr and Mrs Loving. In fact, Hollywood is so attracted to the whole "one person saves the world" trope that they appropriated the story of how collective action by Bolivians, known as the Cochabamba Water Wars forced the government to un-privatize their water supply and basically turned it into James Bond saving those poor Bolivian victims in Quantum of Solace. But Hollywood isn't the only media industry that thoroughly avoids all mention of collective action and unions, except to demonize them. Most literature pumped out by the publishing industry, except for leftist presses, completely ignores the rich history of labor organizing in the US. Television shows like to go into the past, but they ignore that part of history with a 33 foot barge pole. For the most part, America likes to pretend that we do not have class issues at all and that the current economic system is extremely problematic for a whole lot of American families. Hollywood is interested in the business of making money in that same capitalist system that is thoroughly critiqued in this film, and is not at all interested in killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Therefore stories of this nature are mostly left to leftist activists and historians to tell in books usually published by small leftist presses, or passed down as oral history to the kids and grandkids of those who were there.
But even leftist presses have a rather large blind spot. When I went looking for Latino experiences with unions, I found very little literature to peruse. Most of what I found had to do with unions as they were founded by and affected white men. Some literature focused on how white women fought for their place in unions, and some portion with the African American experience therein. But except for the occasional article such as Labor and Labor Strikes:Historical Background, Latinos and Latinas, American Unions, and Workers' Movements and a google extract from a book which I will get to in a minute, I wasn't really able to find a lot of good stuff on the topic, which is quite annoying since I am now quite curious:). But first, the article. The first thing that interested me was the kind of push pull relationship that unions and Latinos had. For example:
The AFL at first provided assistance to Mexican workers, as in the 1903 Oxnard, California, strike, but as the numbers of Mexicans in the United States increased, organized labor came to oppose further unskilled emigration from Mexico.
In addition to this, Latinos brought a much more radical critique of societal norms with them to America:
Latino and Latina workers brought with them a labor organizing tradition steeped in the dialectics of anarchism, socialism, and nationalism. Many Mexican workers were followers of anarcho-syndicalism, and Puerto Rican and Cuban labor newspapers and workers' clubs censured local bosses, the colonial elite in the homeland, and the whole system of U.S. imperialist exploitation. Mexicans and Cubans joined the Holy Order of the Knights of Labor because this American labor organization embraced racial equality. However, because of the racism in the U.S. labor movement and their own strong ethnic identity, Spanish-speaking members of the Knights formed separate local assemblies.
The bolded line annoys me somewhat. Comparing racism with someone's pride in their ethnic identity is comparing apples with oranges. There are times when disprivileged people need a safe space to congregate, and that need is dramatically stronger when one is faced with oppression from the dominant majority, especially when they are supposed to be on your side, and then betray you. And as it happens, "Salt of The Earth" provides an example of how do run an integrated assembly of whites and Hispanics, with Spanish and English being spoken and occasionally translated for the benefit of non-speaking workers of either language. This commonsense setup was breathtaking to me in light of the current rightwing rhetoric around Hispanics on a whole, and it makes me curious about the current setup of integrated labor organizations and how they navigate the different languages that their members speak today. I can note that I am seeing some activism around combating the dominance and privilege of English only communication in some of the spaces of which I am a member, in the form of articles written in some magazines that provide two translations, one in English, one in Spanish; and articles and literature that incorporate both languages, sometimes without translation.
The article continues to give an interesting historical breakdown of the history of Latino union organizing, including the obstacles and conditions that they were facing from the employers. For instance:
Mexican workers joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to resist their exploitation as second-class workers. Through the United Mine Workers of America, the struggle between Mexican miners and the coal operators culminated in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. In 1917, Mexican copper miners in Jerome and Bisbee, Arizona, went on strike against the Phelps Dodge Corporation and met opposition from the oppressive syndicalist laws passed to break the IWW unions.Naturally, if people have no idea that unions have a strong history in the US, they tend to have no idea what strong tactics were applied to break their power for the temerity of asking that they stop being exploited.
This scene that tells what happened to the women was not exaggerated and worse could and did happen. (SALT OF THE EARTH (1954) 7/10)
And this was NOT an isolated event. A quick look at A People's History of USA by Howard Zinn (yes, kids, the entire book is online:) @ least for now), particularly in chapters 13 through 15, give a very eyeopening and somewhat stomach churning view about how far the state and employers were prepared to go protect their profits. There were several massacres of unarmed protesters with women and children not at all spared, in addition to harassment, prison terms, deportation, beatings, firings and many and varied other means of social control. A hell of a lot of people paid a VERY high price for what we have today, and its not as if there is not a hell of a lot more that needs to be done.
Of course, considering the derth of information that is easily available for latinos in unions as a whole, information about latino women in unions is even scacrer. However, google has an large excerpt from the completely AWESOME book Latinas: Hispanic Women in The United States by Hedda Garza, is CHOCK FULL of information on Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Unions and women in particular, including the delicious news at the last paragraph on page 73 that some Latina women actually became copper miners briefly during during the Second World War! (The link takes you to page 74, just scroll up!) They ran headlong into sexism because the men didn't want to enroll them in the unions, so they organized wildcat strikes (not endorsed by an official union) themselves for better wages and working conditions and an end to sexual harassment by the foremen. Unfortunately, after the war, they lost the battle to keep their jobs when the men came home from the front, and they fell out of recorded history for a while. Starting from page 77, the book chronicles the united efforts of the government and corporations and the press using the methods mentioned in the above paragraph, and also chronicles the fighting back that Latinas engaged in against FBI and CIA hounding and deportation. On page 81, Garza provides the historical story behind the Mine-Mills Strike in the 1950s, which is even more fascinating than the movie version. It was that piece of history that led me to acquire the book in order to read the whole story, but for those who can't afford that right now, a significant chunk of it is on google.
Finally, I was fascinated by the mention by Ramon and Esperanza that two generations ago, Ramon's family had actually owned his own land, and that the town's was San Marcos. I could identify with the fact that in two generations the town had been renamed the unattractive "Zinc Town" and had become a company town and Ramon and his family found themselves pretty much living by the will of his greedy employers who locked his oral history as "claims", because it reminded me of British colonialist history and present cultural appropriation being practiced right now, "justified" by the greedy and sordid idea that land and other resources could and still can simply be stolen at will by the stronger party and in this new day copyrighted and sold back to the people who owned the darn things in the first place! I just had to confirm that the war which probably sealed the Quintero family's fate was probably The Mexican-American War or the American Invasion of Mexico. I am still interested in the precise means by which the Zinc Company got ahold of all the land in town, so I intend to look that up for my own edification, even though I am sure that it is going to make rather stomach turning reading.
One of the things I noticed in the reading was that some viewers tried to categorize the movie as dealing with one strand of leftist politics. Thus some people see it mostly a feminist movie, and some people see it as mostly a movie about class issues. I think that people who think that way are highly mistaken. The joy of the movie for me is its acknowledgment that oppression is multifaceted and intersectional and that the system is kyriarchal rather than just patriarchal. Class and Race and Gender all intersect and compound oppression in those characters' lives, and while the film didn't get around to mentioning it there were sure to be disability issues as well. Trying to simplify this film into being about just one of these themes is to commit the same nonsense that has contributed the to splintering of the left for so long, namely to ignore and deny the experiences of various people who are at the center and the margins of the various crosscurrents of oppression. A disabled Latina union member cannot throw off any of her identities, and shouldn't need to. I think that had this film not been censored, the left might have learned a bit more quickly to stop shooting itself in the foot and start doing the hard work of learning to serve all its members and not just a privileged few.
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