:On Strike and On Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America

Abstract

Historian Ellen Baker has written an impressive first book that finally does historical justice to one of the most famous labor strikes of the Cold War era. Importantly, Baker's account delivers three different levels of analysis of Mine-Mill local 890's miners' strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico, in October 1950. Because the labor action and the underlying gender tensions within the striking miners' families were made famous by the radical semi-documentary film Salt of the Earth (1954), Baker is required to do a multilevel analysis of the conditions surrounding the strike which elevates the book to much more than a traditional labor history. The first part of the book, however, does provide a long, detailed account of the social and economic conditions of Grant County, which moved from an Apache-dominated, out-of-the-way region of southern New Mexico in the late-nineteenth century to a sophisticated, highly racialized outpost of a global mining industry by the mid-twentieth century. The industrial workforce that came to risk their lives and earn their livelihoods in the region by the early twentieth century were strictly divided by race, as was the social geography of the neighboring company towns and the larger town of Silver City. The labor revolts and New Deal politics of the 1930s drew communist organizers to the difficult arena of labor organizing in the industry, while participation by Mexican Americans in the armed services in World War II made it probable that returning veterans would seek greater opportunities through organized labor in the CIO Mine-Mill union.