Hiding The Salt

Hiding The Salt

Salt of the Earth (Part 1) (from Youtube)


Having recently read "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn, and thus coming into contact with the hidden labor history of the United States, the disclosure that we were going to watch Salt of the Earth (Biberman, 1954), a film about unions fighting the tyranny and greed of mine owners was a welcome surprise. The history of the labor movement in the USA is actually full of dramatic incident that would make gripping and interesting films, but the political climate of America has led Hollywood to steer very clear of these stories. The events surrounding the making of this film provide a cautionary tale that helps to explain their timidity. Salt of the Earth was made by several blacklisted Hollywood professionals who were accused by the House UnAmerican Committee of being Communists. According to the Selected Readings packet that we recieved, Director Harold Biberman was jailed for six months and Producer Paul Jarrico fled the US to avoid being caught up in the witch-hunt, while writer Micheal Wilson wrote under a psuedonym in order to continue to make a living.

During the production, their main actress Rosaura Revueltas was arrested and deported on charges that she was an illegal alien and they were harassed on set by authorities. When the film finished shooting, editors refused to edit it, and movie theatres refused to screen it on the grounds that it was communist propoganda. So much for freedom. As the rhetoric died down over the years, the film began to find an audience on college campuses and in feminist enclaves and other places where equality of the people is not considered a dirty word that will totes bring down the American capitalist system immediately.

The plot of the film in brief is that Mexican American unionized men are fighting mine owners because they are being paid less than White workers in similar mines. Their wives and daughters and daughters want to join the strike, but the men sexistly think that the women have no business in the frontlines of a strike. The film focuses specifically on the conflict between union leader Ramon Quintero's conflict with his wife Esperanza and how the outcome of the conflict affects the way the strike continues to be carried out.

I was most interested in Rob Waring's piece "Not for ourselves alone and Salt of the Earth: The Interplay of Race and Gender", because it is the only essay from the packet which addresses the tensions between race and gender where activism is concerned. I was not particularly impressed with his analysis, however. For instance, the idea that gender equality is not a hot topic in the affirmative action debate is laughable on its face. The everlasting issue of wage disparities that are to the detriment of women has never stopped being discussed, and there are countless articles discussing the various glass ceilings for women across professions, and also commenting on the fact that women-dominant professions get ill-paid, no matter how important to the successful running of the society they may be. Plus, books like Paula Giddings' When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, and the forthcoming The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Partner Violence Among Activist Communities Edited By Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani and Leah Lakhshmi Piepzna- Samarashinha (I read an early version) are among the countless books and blogposts by feminists of all colors that have confronted the larger leftist movement with the fact that they expect and demand that work be done towards causes such as poverty, racism and other inequities, but are remarkably resistant to paying attention to the inequalities that they are helping to perpetuate on women. The concept of "all oppressions being linked" did not come out of a void, after all.

All Oppression is Connected - Stacey Ann Chin


Based on the materials, I would like more discussion on how women's rights are still not folded into the larger leftist organizing for a better way of life, and how women are still considered free labor to be exploited for what are consider largers concerns such as poverty and racism, even though those larger concerns impact them too, and in fact get magnified when they intertwine with sexism.


I learned about the Taft-Hartley Act through Wikipedia. Apparently, it is a law that was passed by Congress on behalf of business interests to crack down on various types of union protest, including wildcat strikes (striking without permission of your union), and establishing the state right to pass "right to work" laws that pretty much banned unions from organizing.