Salt of the Earth, Essay Example

This film promotes the values of equality and solidarity in two ways. First, its story portrays social and economic inequality and divisiveness, pitting Anglos against Latinos; management (most white) against workers (mostly Latino); and men against their wives. In the course of the film the workers’ wives achieve equality and solidarity with their husbands, who eventually win their strike for better pay and conditions. Second, the making of the film itself required equality and solidarity on the part of the filmmakers, shown most clearly by the use of a lot of non-professional actors in its leading speaking parts.[1] Although the film’s themes are obvious, the political and budgetary limitations imposed on the filmmakers could not be fully overcome. As a result, the film does not stand alone as a unified work of art.

The battle lines are drawn in the first words of the film, as narrated by the miner’s housewife Esperanza Quintero: “How shall I begin my story that has no beginning? In these [lands][2] my great-grandfather raised cattle before the Anglos ever came . . . our roots go deeper than the pines, deeper than the mine shafts. This is my village. When I was a child it was called San Marcos. The Anglos changed the name to Zinctown. New Mexico, USA” (Bieberman). This is going to be a story of a dispossessed people, foreigners in their own land, who now do lethal work for peon pay: a few minutes into the film, miners confront an Anglo manager over a new rule that miners must work alone while blasting. “If you can’t handle it, we’ll get someone else,” the Anglo tells them. “Who, a scab?” they miners ask. “An American” the Anglo replies.

But even before this scene we have learned of another line of battle. Esperanza’s young son has gotten into a fight with an Anglo boy. Esperanza has told him not to fight, but the boy replies that “Papa says if an Anglo makes fun of me to let him have it” — a welcome sign for the viewer that the film may actually be more than pure labor-union agitprop. This underlying social line of stress finally breaks when the women, tired of chopping wood all day for their thankless husbands, decide to force those husbands to demand hot-water plumbing and indoor bathrooms. At this juncture, a blasting accident takes place, which is the catalyst for a strike. When Esperanza shows up with the other women at the miners’ meeting, her husband Ramon is clearly displeased with her. One of the women — not Esperanza, who is pregnant and clearly of the docile nature expected of a Latino wife at that time and place — argues that their demands also be met. The men, having agreed to strike, treat the women with scant respect and vote to adjourn without agreeing to the women’s demands. However, in the course of the strike the men reluctantly realize they need the women’s support, at least behind the picket-line if not on it.

In the course of the strike, management tries to hire strikebreakers — “Anglos from out of town” — and try to cajole Ramon with an implied promise of promotion to break with the “Red agitators.” He refuses this offer. Immediately a crisis ensues when a couple of miners’ kids, working as scouts, spot some strikebreakers hiding in a gully. Ramon confronts one of them and is arrested and beaten up by the cops. Following the standard dramatic technique of resolving one crisis by adding another, Ramon’s wife goes into labor, and the sheriff refuses to get the company doctor — the only one available. In the most intense sequence in the film, we alternatively see and hear the contorted faces of Esperanza and Ramon, united by pain.

The child is born healthy and Esperanza recovers. Ramon does too after a stay in the hospital followed by a month in the county jail. We then see a scene of the baby, Juan, being christened in a Catholic church, and the viewer can only assume that as a matter of course the local Catholic priest is neutral as regards the strike. To paraphrase singer Paul Simon, no radical priest will get Ramon released to be on the cover of Newsweek  (Simon). In any case, Esperanza waits for Ramon’s return from jail before christening the baby, another act of solidarity and probably a significant-enough one for the time, place, and faith. This is an important segment in the film and in the story. It conveys the unmistakable message that labor unions and strikers are not necessarily the “Red agitators” that management assumes them to be. They are just united.

But divisiveness is still there. At a party to celebrate the christening and Ramon’s release, the men ignore the women and take over the parlor “as usual” to play cards and talk shop instead of dancing with their wives. Ramon is a griper, far from perfect as a man and a husband. Even his Latino buddies, who have little patience for Ramon’s grumbling, say so. Ramon for his part complains about the professional union-organizer Frank Barnes, who is white. In Ramon’s eyes, he is always over-planning everything and leaving nothing for the miners because he thinks they are lazy, an accusation the man denies while admitting that he has a lot to learn about the miners’ Mexican-based culture. When Barnes’s wife Ruth, also white, overhears him say that women needed to be treated as equals, she sarcastically congratulates her husband as the new “world champion of women’s rights” and then describes herself as a “camp follower” from state to state.  She then assures the Latinas there that “wives don’t count in the Anglo’s local either.” As the women then force their husbands to dance, Ramon and Esperanza work out their own disagreements as Ramon watches his new baby, Juan, sleep. “They say I’m no good to you,” Ramon sullenly tells Esperanza. “You’re no good to me in jail,” she replies, in agitator mode.

The strike continues into its seventh month, and some miners, unable to afford the lack of wages and the strike-fund diminishing, begin to waver. Adjustments are made: hardship cases can look for work in other mines and then divide their wages with the union. Ramon, however, “only” has three children and must stay on strike. But then help arrives from “our own people” from the Southwest and then the whole country, “Messages of solidarity,” as Esperanza narrates. The men continue to realize that their wives and daughters have a greater role to play in helping the strike than just as “cooks and coffee makers,” and so “they let us stay.”

But then a new crisis arrives: the courts impose “a Taft-Hartley injunction, they called it,” and order the miners to stop picketing. Failure to obey the order will bring heavy fines and jail sentences. A meeting ensues and Barnes tells the miners and their wives that either way the strike is lost. “The decision is yours — it’s up to you.” Ramon makes clear he wants to fight “this rotten Taft-Hartley.” But Teresa Vidal, the most outspoken of the wives, stands up and points out that the injunction only prohibits the miners from picketing. She proposes that the women take their place. This suggestion is laughed down at first but she persists. Whether the women should participate is then hotly debated in a sequence that resembles the church scene in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 film High Noon when the townsfolk debate about Will Kane’s plea for help in dealing with Frank Miller and his gang (Zinnemann). “Well, the bosses win now because there is no unity between the men, their wives, their sisters,” says chairman Charley Vidal, husband to the forceful Teresa. But unlike the parishioners in High Noon, the union  — as a reconvened community-meeting where non-union members can vote — unite and take action: the wives will walk the picket line in place of their husbands. The women are now equals.

This is probably the true end of the film because the message of solidarity and equality has been made and the rest is known history: the strikers win because women from all around came to participate. Men come too, to see if the women will stick it out. Other men, including the Anglo Barnes, refuse to let their wives walk the line, just as Ramon refuses to let Esperanza at first. “Anglo husbands can be backward too,” Esperanza tells Ramon, who takes offense at the word but keeps mum. After the violent meeting between the law and the ladies, there is even comic relief as Ramon learns the tired and tedious life of being a househusband. In any case, all ends well “for the present” as the mining executive says by way of conditional capitulation. He probably meant that the miners would pay for the improvements themselves in the form of gradually higher prices at the company store and higher rents in the company-owned houses.

As mentioned earlier, the filmmakers employed equality and solidarity too just by having the courage to make and complete the film, which is clearly a low-budget production. A lot of doing-their-best non-professional actors were used, presumably because too many professional ones declined, probably out of fear as much as the low pay that must have been offered. It is ironic but the fact is that the filmmakers were, in a sense, strikebreakers themselves because they worked in opposition to established unions. They were likely treated as such by the Hollywood film community, which at the time was terrified of being labeled as Communist, just as, twenty years earlier, they were terrified of being labeled as immoral. The professionals in the film risked being blacklisted. Although Will Geer had a successful career, Rosaura Revueltas, whose every scene and word stand out against the backdrop of the non-professional cast, probably was blacklisted. Or maybe she was just too Mexican for Hollywood and not 1950s starlet material.

Equality and solidarity can work in real life, but Zinctown probably remained a place for its young people to leave to join the wider world. Artistic expression is a different kind of real life. Revueltas shone alone in the film, made unequal by her talent and unable to achieve artistic solidarity with her co-stars. Divided it fell. She gave life to the movie even if it killed her career.

Works Cited

High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Perf. Gary Cooper. 1952. Film.

Salt of the Earth. Dir. Herbert J. Bieberman. Perf. Rosaura Revueltas. 1952. Film.

Simon, Paul. “Me and a Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” Paul Simon. By Paul Simon. 1972. LP.

The Milagro Beanfield War. Dir. Robert Redford. Perf. Ruben Blades. 1988. Film.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Humphrey Bogart. 1948. Film.

[1] The film’s overall style is somewhat similar to the fictional story The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston), while its subject matter might bring to mind The Milagro Beanfield War (Redford), also fictional.

[2] The word is unclear and probably Mexican.