Ellen Baker

Faculty Essay, 2014-2015

A Crisis in the Union

            Word spread fast. On the afternoon of June 12, 1951, sheriff’s deputies came to the union hall with an court injunction: officers, agents, and members of Mine-Mill Local 890 had to stop picketing the Empire Zinc Company or face immediate arrest.[1] This court order, coming just a day after a fight between striking miners and sheriff’s deputies at Empire Zinc, electrified the mining district in this southwestern corner of New Mexico. Phones rang, cars threaded their way to the picket, women hurried to tell their neighbors. Men starting their shift in other mines told those workers just leaving. That night, crowding into the biggest dance hall that could be found, hundreds of union members and supporters confronted their dilemma: if the union obeyed the injunction, replacement workers could enter the mine and the ten-month-long strike would be lost; if it disobeyed, all of the picketers could be arrested—and the strike would be lost.

            Everyone agreed that the stakes in this strike were high. The late 1940s and early 1950s were a period of fierce class conflict in the United States, and companies used anticommunism as a battering ram against left-wing unions like Mine-Mill.[2] Elsewhere, and in other industries, companies had succeeded; in Grant County they had thus far failed. Confronted in 1948 by companies willing to negotiate new contracts only with “good Americans,” for example, Mine-Mill Local 890 successfully used walkouts, sit-downs, and strikes to force companies to the bargaining table.[3] Local 890 challenged the dual-wage system that kept Mexican Americans in “Mexican” jobs, and it pressed a similar agenda beyond the workplace by entering local politics. Mine-Mill members and leaders believed that the district’s other mining companies were colluding with Empire Zinc to destroy the militant, left-wing union.[4] Thus the Empire Zinc strike of 1950–52 was understood as a showdown. From October 1950 to March 1951, the company tried to outlast the strikers, but even the shrinking strike funds did not drive strikers back to work. Then Empire Zing launched a back-to-work movement, which failed to lure strikers back to work. The court injunction was the company’s next step: using the power of the state to force the strikers back to work.

            At the union meeting on June 12, men wanted to stay on the pickets and hold their ground against the sheriff. But then they heard an unexpected alternative from three women. Aurora Chávez, Virginia Chacón, and Virginia Jencks had met ahead of time and arrived at the meeting ready to advance an unusual strategy.[5] The injunction referred only to union officers, agents, and members, they pointed out. Perhaps women, then, could picket with impunity. Surely no judge would think women belonged to the union? Surely no union man could object to a way to obey the injunction and simultaneously circumvent it?

            But union men did object. “What are you gonna do with the children?” they asked. “I’m sure not gonna take care of them!”[6] Some men were afraid their wives would be injured on the line, and others thought that “shenanigans” would take place on the line—that their wives would run off with other men.[7] But most of the women were soon fired up by the chance to take over the picket, eager to help defend the union.[8] The “stronger” women, in Anita Tórrez’s words, were not stymied by the problem of childcare. They would “do [their] own problem-solving [if] the men didn’t want to share in solving the problem.”[9] Braulia Velásquez commented later that “we had a hard job convincing the men but we finally did it by a vote.”[10] Around 2:30 the next morning, with women voting alongside men—a provision granted them by the International union—Local 890 decided that women would take over the pickets.[11] The women started planning their shifts.

            Early the morning of June 13, scores of women arrived at the Empire Zinc picket lines in the small town of Hanover. Sheriff Leslie Goforth may have been among those county officials who “opined that the women were not technically union members and therefore would not be affected by [Judge A.W.] Marshall’s order.”[12] In any case, Goforth chose to watch carefully rather than act hastily. His twenty deputies harassed the women, but scabs could not pierce the women’s barrier and enter the mine.[13] Women were thrilled by their victory and swept into the next union meeting eager to tell stories of the pickets. It was hard “catching the sneaking scabs crawling through the pine trees,” Braulia Velásquez reported. But “no scabs were crossing our lines,” declared Aurora Chávez. “We don’t need men.”[14] More women were needed on “our line,” and Elvira Molano and Daría Chávez exhorted them to come to the pickets the next morning.[15]

            The hundreds of women who answered the call came from all over Grant County. Dolores Jiménez, for example, carpooled with neighbors for the twelve-mile drive north from Hurley. Her husband Frank worked at Kennecott’s smelter, not at Empire Zinc, but she had heard about this strike and had been encouraged to join by her friend, Clorinda Alderette.[16] Elvira Molano, married to an Empire Zinc striker, was several years older and fearless in the face of the deputies. Before the women’s picket, in fact, she had walked the men’s picket and been arrested in the fight that prompted Empire Zinc to seek the court injunction.[17] All of the women found the pickets an exciting place to be. On the line they sang, they danced (with their husbands playing guitars on the hillside), they laughed, they crocheted. And they often wanted to stay beyond their shift.[18] Away from the line, women staffed all of the strike committees except the negotiating committee; they wrote publicity materials, spoke on the union’s weekly radio show, persuaded local newspaper editors to publish union letters, and divvied up the strike relief funds. They tightened their own organization, meeting regularly on their own and electing picket captains and other leaders.[19] “The way people are moving now,” Evelina Vigil predicted, “shows that we will win this strike. I’m ready to be there any time.”[20]

            But perhaps Vigil should have said, “the way women are moving now,” for the men were not always moving alongside them. Physically, perhaps, they were, for men stayed near the pickets; but many were stalled in their moral support for the women’s action, uneasy over their wives’ willingness “to be there any time.” While both women and men believed that the union needed to be defended, their different reactions to the women’s picket came out of gendered understandings of the union that needed this defense and of the families who could provide it.

            Two models of unionism had coexisted until the injunction crisis forced the differences between them into the open on June 12. One model was based on a brotherhood of men—and exclusively men—who protected one another against the dangers of mining and exploitation by management. This was a brotherhood of equals, whose equality rested on their shared status as breadwinners in their individual families. By interrupting the normal workings of the family, the women’s picket appeared to threaten male authority and power, which in turn cast doubt on the breadwinner system that defined men’s purpose in the workplace and cemented union solidarity. The other union model was based on a larger union family, whose members endured sacrifices during strikes for long-term economic security, and who helped consolidate the union’s power beyond the workplace, partly through the activities of the ladies’ auxiliary. Taking over the picket followed logically from women’s recent auxiliary work and, most importantly, promised to defend the union against the latest company assault. Those who thought in terms of the union family saw the threat to normal family life as merely temporary and saw men’s resistance as divisive precisely when unity was most needed.

            The vote on June 12 was a victory of the union family over the union brotherhood, and this decision set the parameters for the events to follow. But the vote did not wipe out the underlying differences that had generated the two visions. To the contrary, it simply set those differences in sharper relief once the implications for families became clear: women would let their household duties take second place to their picket duties, and men would not willingly take on women’s work. Out of that juxtaposition came a new situation that demanded attention to gender relations. Individual homes and the union hall became the spaces in which new arrangements between men and women were hammered out; the picket lines and courthouse became the places where women developed a new political consciousness and solidarity that they brought to these household negotiations.

            Women did not begin their picket with gender relations on their minds; they aimed only to defend the union community. But their husbands’ resistance looked childish given the stakes of this union battle, and the story of the women’s picket thus became a story of women’s rebellion, not just against the Empire Zinc Company, but also against their own husbands. What grants this story even greater significance is that it became the theme of a remarkable movie made in 1953—Salt of the Earth—starring these same union men and women; indeed, making Salt of the Earth reveals their effort to make sense of what had happened to them.

The Union as a Militant Brotherhood

            Men resented the women’s picket because they sensed its threat to the “natural” order: their wives expected them to move to the sidelines of their own strike and even to take on women’s work, both of which publicly eroded men’s status. But there was more to union men’s resistance than a defense of male authority for its own sake. This authority was also a dimension of the masculinity that shaped Mine-Mill Local 890’s structure and infused its battle for workplace power. As miners built their union in the 1940s, they used, deliberately or not, models of the family to shape their relationships with one another. Already familiar with the horizontal and vertical relationships inherent in families, union men drew upon three sets of relationships—those of brothers, husbands, and fathers—in structuring the union. The union became a brotherhood made up of equals bound to one another by mutual needs and reinforced by the exclusion of women; the workplace danger that required mutual help also required individual courage, and women’s absence from mines and mills ensured that this courage would be associated with men.

            Union men’s fraternal equality (the kind of brotherhood they felt) was itself partly based on another set of family relationships: these men were equals not only because they had the same experiences at work, but also because they each headed their own household, or aspired to do so. Male breadwinners exercised their authority over the women and children in their private families, away from this fictive family in the union hall; yet men achieved the status of breadwinner, from which their authority at home derived, in the workplace. The democratic structure of the union was rooted in this brand of social equality. Still another dimension of their fraternity was its grounding in shared ethnicity and, at the same time, its capacity to transcend ethnic barriers, to attract Anglo workers to a brotherhood that affirmed the social equality of Mexicans and Anglos.

            The miners’ union was much more than a fraternal club, of course. Its central purpose was to deal collectively with a powerful adversary. Here, too, family relations and masculinity came into play, but with a twist. Management insisted that a family relationship structured the workplace. As Kennecott labor relations expert James K. Richardson instructed the New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, “[l]abor negotiations should be, in my opinion, family affairs.”[21] As in any industry, it was common for managers to speak of the company as one big family, working together, headed by a father; this corresponded to a notion that any differences between labor and management were “merely a misunderstanding by each party of the aims of the other. Each has a basic willingness to promote a free enterprise system.”[22] In exerting paternalist control, management assured workers that it knew best what workers’ interests were (because they were the same as the company’s) and how best to protect them. Managers were parents and workers were children.

            In the Southwest, paternalism took on another dimension: Anglos were parents and Mexicans were children. Companies had long characterized Mexican workers as docile, prone to laziness, and indifferent to work conditions that “American” workers would not tolerate; lazy workers needed the firm, fatherly governance that a mining company provided. Thus when miners joined Mine-Mill, demanded better wages, and pursued grievances, they challenged both the cultural definition of Mexicans as ethnically inferior and the paternalistic labor relations in local mines and mills. Their combative, militant stance vindicated both their manhood and their Mexican ethnicity.

The Union as a Larger Family

            Women drew on a competing vision of the union, one that also came out of the “militant” tradition but existed in some tension with it. In the late 1940s, Local 890 began to campaign against segregation in local schools, businesses, and housing. The impetus to expand the union’s activism beyond the workplace came from Mine-Mill organizers Clinton and Virginia Jencks, who moved to New Mexico from Denver in 1947. Having studied the history of mining struggles, the Jenckses believed that without women, the union was acting with one hand tied behind its back.[23] Moreover, the Jenckses belonged to a left-wing tradition that, in the 1940s, criticized male chauvinism and theorized the political significance of housework.[24]

            Inspired by these views, and experienced from years of political organizing, Virginia Jencks pushed hard for the union to hold regular family meetings. She walked house to house and struck up conversations with miners’ wives, encouraging them to come to union meetings where families would eat and then play games, watch a movie, or talk about political issues. Virginia Chacón, who soon joined Jencks, found that “some women were interested, but it sounded like they were scared” of their husbands.[25] Indeed, it took some doing to get men to invite their wives to union meetings, but Mine-Mill’s structure and political orientation made these invitations a bit easier to extend. The Mine-Mill International allowed women to vote, which very few male-dominated unions did and which probably came in tandem with the union’s move toward the Left in the 1930s.[26] Miners’ wives further developed the union family model when they formed a ladies’ auxiliary in the summer of 1948. Like other union auxiliaries, Auxiliary 209 was based on the principle that anything affecting a male breadwinner necessarily affected his family. With a wife in the union, a union man like Juan Chacón could come home and say, “this and this is happening, we’re gonna do this, you gotta help.” The auxiliary would be the backbone of the union, just “like a wife [was] the backbone of [her] husband.”[27]

            Gender functioned, albeit differently, in the two models of unionism, serving to unify the “brothers” and marking out appropriate realms of action for union “family” members. The auxiliary was the realm in which women joined the union effort. Many women’s historians have interpreted auxiliary activities along axes that stretch from the “domestic” to the “social” and then to the “political,” or from the “traditional” to the “non-traditional.” Traditional activities projected women’s domesticity onto the union community; they included organizing socials and dances, cooking, offering medical care to wounded strikers, and buying only union-made products and services. They were often associated with domestic life and, importantly, with countering the “nagging wife syndrome”—the hostility of wives toward their husbands’ union, and especially toward strikes.[28] Non-traditional, political activities, by contrast, could broaden women’s perspective and make women into staunch unionists; these activities included demonstrating, speaking in public, picketing, and joining political campaigns. Auxiliary 209 can be understood this way, for it took up the typical tasks of a union auxiliary; through raffles and enchilada suppers, women aimed to nourish the union family. And auxiliary members became more politically active over time, in registering voters and boycotting discriminatory businesses, as well as during each strike that Local 890 conducted.

            But another way to consider gender in the union is to look at which issues the union considered within its purview. That is, apart from the gendered composition of the union and women’s own activities, we can see gender in the sorts of issues that became union business. From this perspective, it is clear that before the Empire Zinc strike, the auxiliary was precisely that: an auxiliary, always ancillary and subordinate to union men. Women believed, in fact, that it was this union family that they were defending when they stepped onto the Empire Zinc picket line. But by inverting family responsibilities, the women’s picket forced union members to confront the thorny question of male dominance in families. No longer did gender function only as an organizing principle for the union’s composition and activities. Now gender relations themselves became a union issue.

Household Conflict

            The union had to deal with those power relations because couples immediately began to argue about the picket. Aurora Chávez, for instance, had a big fight with her husband, even though (or perhaps because) she had been one of the women to propose the picket. He “didn’t like it at all,” she recalled. “He knew how it was gonna be and he didn’t like it.” Aurora was pregnant, and Agustín feared the violence that his wife would face.[29] As a husband and father, he took seriously his responsibility to protect his wife and children. A married, pregnant woman facing down a leering, armed deputy could mean only that her husband had failed: either he would not or could not protect them, and either way he looked bad. Agustín Chávez also feared—correctly—that he would have to take care of their three children, all under the age of ten.[30] The women’s picket meant, then, not only that he would be failing to meet one of his responsibilities, but also that she would fail to meet hers.

            Fighting over the performance of duties, Aurora and Agustín Chávez nonetheless agreed on how a family should be run. Any family is, in some respects, a unit with clear objectives, bringing together cash and non-cash resources to feed, house, clothe, educate, and discipline its members. In the breadwinner model—widely accepted by working-class families at the time and especially powerful in mining districts, which were built around an industry whose workforce was male—husbands provided wages and security while wives cared for children and kept house.[31] These responsibilities complemented one another and corresponded to realms of authority, particularly over children.[32]

            But necessity often demanded flexibility of the breadwinner model. Every miner’s wife faced the possibility of her husband’s absence, whether by injury, death, or desertion. Approximately seventeen percent of Hanover’s households in 1930, for example, were headed by women, three-quarters of whom were widows and most of whom were in their forties with children.[33] In these instances women had to find ways to support their families, usually by taking in laundry or boarders; women with sons old enough to work in the mines could rely on that income. As historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has shown of colonial New England women, under extraordinary circumstances a wife could become a “deputy husband” who performed men’s work and exercised a husband’s power.[34] Local 890 women saw their picket in a similar light: if men were incapacitated by the injunction, it fell to women to sustain the union effort.

            Yet while the Empire Zinc strike circumstances were extraordinary, there was one key difference: these husbands were alive, they were present, and they were not interested in assuming the role of a “deputy wife.” There was, in fact, no deputy wife that mirrored a deputy husband. This discrepancy results from the critical asymmetry of family power relations; while husbands’ and wives’ duties complemented one another, they were not commensurate, nor interchangeable. A household may share goals, agree on the way to reach them, and allocate power to do so, but it nonetheless comprises distinct people with distinct interests exercising different kinds of power, and the apparent unity of the family results from struggles of power. In systems of male dominance, male authority can override female authority at critical moments, by virtue of cultural prerogative or physical force, although women are not without resources of their own.[35] In the Chávez home, Aurora prevailed over her husband, but not because Agustín took on childcare: her father sent her teenage sister Rachel to help out while Aurora walked on the line.[36] Neither husband nor wife had to give in because their extended family was on hand to make up the difference.

            Not all families resolved this conflict the way the Chávezes did. Chana Montoya, for example, appealed to a different kind of authority: the union community. Just two days after women began their picket, she insisted upon “more help from men on the jobs off the line. More help on the job we cannot do at home while we are doing this job.”[37] Montoya spoke with some authority. She was married to Local 890 President Cipriano Montoya, so her words probably carried weight in a union meeting. But her comments stand out even more when we learn that she regularly suffered abuse at her husband’s hands. Many people knew this; no one discussed it. She was probably speaking from her own experience at home, and for her even to hint at domestic conflict is astonishing. Perhaps her call was made easier by Cipriano’s absence from that particular meeting.[38]

            Cipriano Montoya presided over another important union meeting, though, and hinted at his idea of women’s duties. In October 1951, Local 890 celebrated the first anniversary of the Empire Zinc strike. While strike committee chairman Ernesto Velásquez praised the women as “veterans,” a term fully laden with masculine honor, Cipriano Montoya first congratulated the entire membership and then commended the women for “knowing that they have . . . work to do at home.”[39] At this meeting, meant to reflect upon the difficulties they had faced and the victories they had won, Montoya chose to remind women of their household duties. His praise extended only so far as they met those obligations. Chana Montoya did not speak at this meeting.

Solidarity on the Picket Line

            When women and men confronted one another at home, men brought the force of their customary authority. Women brought the strength of the solidarity they generated on the picket lines and the new light it shed on their husbands’ behavior. Their recent history of auxiliary organization and the tremendous energy unleashed by the unusual strike conditions together forged the solidarity that enabled women picketers to respond to threats, the most important of which were direct violence and unfair treatment at the hands of local law enforcers. Successfully meeting those threats changed their understanding of local political economy and of their husbands’ claims to authority.

            More than anything else, women created solidarity by resisting law enforcers. Sheriff Goforth was ordered to break up the roadblocks on June 16, and he found himself in an ordeal that strengthened the women as it left him helpless. When a deputy pushed Virginia Chacón aside to let strikebreaker Francisco Franco through, a crowd of women pushed Franco’s car right back down the road.[40] Other women threw rocks. The scabs were angry, Chacón reported, and “began calling us names, and were just dirty to us.”[41] Into this tense scene one of the deputies lobbed a tear-gas grenade, which “skewered and rolled among the pickets, spewing the white gas and dispersing the screaming women.”[42] But the wind favored the women, who soon reorganized their line, cursing the sheriff and jeering at his deputies. Deputies arrested dozens of picketers and sent three carloads to the county jail in nearby Silver City. The arrests did not destroy the picket line, though, for three hundred women remained on the line in Hanover. “We can keep arresting them,” Undersheriff Lewis Brown commented, “but they keep moving in.”[43]

            In all, fifty-three women were arrested that afternoon, many taken to jail with their children in tow. Few had seen the inside of a jail before, and all were nervous until the sheriff made a critical mistake. He promised to release them if they agreed not to return to the picket. Instantly, they announced that they would not “go home, [they would] go back to the picket lines,” and after that the women “had a very good time” playing cards, singing, and making “all kinds of noise.”[44] Only the filth, and a miserable lunch of cold beans, dampened their excitement. The women made such a racket in the county jail—“the worst mess” that jailer Jim Hiler had ever seen—that Goforth released them that night. “It looks like an endless job,” he admitted. And indeed it was, for the women returned to the picket that night, building a “picket tent” that housed food, a stove, and cots.[45] High spirits continued during the arraignment of forty-five women on June 18. Over a hundred women filled the corridors of the county courthouse. “It’s like a picnic,” one woman declared. “We’re having fun—and we’re going to stay on the picket line, too.”[46] Goforth’s effort to intimidate the women succeeded only in uniting them.

            Throughout the summer of 1951, violence continued between the picketers on the one hand and the sheriff, his deputies, and strikebreakers on the other. On July 11, deputy Robert Capshaw tried to arrest Antonia Rivera and immediately found himself the target of rocks and red pepper. “The whole bunch ganged up on about seven deputies,” Sheriff Goforth reported. “The battle wound up as a standoff.”[47] The next day, deputy Marvin Mosely tried to drive his car through the picket line. He hit fourteen-year-old Rachel Juárez, crushing her foot and sending her to the hospital.[48] Juárez “deliberately threw herself on the left fender of my car,” Mosely explained. “I stopped to get her off and she cussed me.”[49] And an even more serious conflict flared on August 23, when five cars of strikebreakers approached the line of forty women and children. Everyone waited, tense and uncertain. Then the cars began to move slowly, “bumper to bumper,” into the line.[50] Bone and muscle strained against steel and engine as the picketers tried to hold the cars back, but one car and a pickup truck made it through and injured two women.[51] A call to the Kennecott company hospital at Santa Rita, which the public had often used for emergencies, met with stony refusal to send an ambulance. “If this call is for the pickets,” the hospital operator allegedly declared, “we have no ambulance. The pickets will have to take care of themselves.”[52] And for the first time the deputies’ guns were used for more than brandishing. Denzel Hartless “jumped out of a car” and “shot about five shots, apparently wildly, during the peak of the fracas.”[53] He wounded Agustín Martínez, a young veteran discharged from the army just nine days before.[54]

            The cumulative effect of this violence was not to inure picketers to it, to make them dismiss it as the normal course of events, but rather to discredit the police. And encounters with the local judiciary furthered this process. One June afternoon, for instance, strikebreaker Jesús Avalos discharged his rifle near the pickets. Lola Martínez confronted him at once and was told that he was only out “shooting rabbits,” an account that Assistant District Attorney Vincent Vesely credited when he declined to prosecute Avalos. Martínez angrily declared that “justice was not for the working people” in Grant County.[55] Elvira Molano was also radicalized by her experience with law enforcement. She was repeatedly injured by deputies—shocking enough to a law-abiding woman, but compounded by being charged with crimes while her attackers went free. “I had never in my life been involved in courts or the law until the Empire Zinc strike,” she declared after deputy Marvin Mosely was acquitted of assault charges. “I thought the law of Grant County was to protect us, not throw us in jail like animals and beat us with blackjacks.”[56] Some deputies keeping “order” on the picket line even did double-duty as strikebreakers. Daría Chávez was outraged to see Mosely and Robert Capshaw sneaking to work at Empire Zinc on the morning of August 10. “It certainly seems funny to us women on the line,” she said, “to see these so-called peace officers, who are supposed to be neutral, now working as scabs. And these are the men the court told us we should respect. They have gone from one dirty job to another. What could be lower than a scab?”[57]

            Experiences on the line gave women a taste of power. Not only did they resist physical assault, but they usually did so without any help from men. And they were exhilarated by it. Moreover, acting in two settings—the picket lines and their own houses—and crossing from one to the other placed both sets of actions in relief. This perspective enabled women to question why issues of justice and equality were limited to relations between the union and the company. Throughout the summer and fall of 1951, in short, women undertook two kinds of defensive actions. The first was to defend their community against the company and its allies; the second to defend their actions against the resentment and active opposition of their husbands, who believed that domestic relations and gender roles should stay constant lest the community be fractured. Convinced that their motives and actions were just, women bristled at their husbands’ antipathy and insisted that the real threat to unity lay in men’s “backward” ideas.

Uneasy Change

            Over time, and through struggle, men accepted being sidelined on the picket lines. Local 890 officials Bob Hollowwa, Clinton Jencks, and Cipriano Montoya explained the union’s involvement in this process to the Mine-Mill’s International Executive Board in August:

In the past few weeks considerable improvement has been made in organizational problems which have come up from time to time. Some problems such as the participation of strikers in helping the women with work in and around the picket line—such as hauling water, chopping wood, furnishing transportation to women pickets, carrying out the numerous odd jobs required at the picket line. Solving these problems have [sic] been accomplished by and thru ‘frank’ discussion of all the people involved.[58]

Some men went even further, accepting changes in their own households as well as at the picket lines, but they did so equivocally. Ernesto Velásquez provides a good example of the complexities bound up in men’s experiences of the women’s picket. An employee of Empire Zinc since 1948, he quickly assumed leadership within the Empire Zinc unit of Local 890 and chaired the strike negotiating committee. In this capacity he addressed the September 1951 convention of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Joking about the role reversals effected by the women’s picket, Velásquez revealed some of his discomfort and, perhaps, his way of easing it.

We will see what my wife says—and I hate to be calling her a wife now—she’s the boss of the family. It so happened the 13th of June she took over the household. We have a little baby and she said you go home and wash the dishes and change the diapers. That puts me in an embarrassing situation. I have washed the dishes and I have swept the house, but one thing I cannot get myself to do and that is change a diaper. Let’s see what Sister Velásquez has to say.[59]

            Sister Velásquez had nothing to say about “taking over the household”; instead, she described the picket and her time in jail. There are any number of reasons that she may have remained silent on the topic that her husband had so clearly and so publicly raised. Perhaps she believed that nothing of substance had changed, or that the changes were too touchy to be aired in this public setting. Perhaps she felt that Ernesto had used humor to trivialize the extent and meaning of changes in gender relations and had thereby won over the largely male audience to his own perspective. For what could be more ridiculous than a female “boss of the family”? And how could a man boss the family if he had to change diapers? What, indeed, could changing diapers represent, if not the debasement that necessarily accompanied wifehood?

            Still, Ernesto Velásquez proved one of the women’s most consistent supporters. Unlike Cipriano Montoya, who generally referred to the strikers as “brothers,” Velásquez acknowledged women as full-fledged union members. He frequently and publicly encouraged women to participate, and his own wife’s steady participation speaks to his sincerity. On the strike’s anniversary, he described how he felt “as a newborn, . . . good as to how solid everything has been over the past year. . . . The women . . . knew nothing about strikes but [now] they are veterans. The women were tear-gassed, jailed, these women have suffered.”[60] In stressing women’s suffering, Velásquez did not dwell on men’s failure to protect their wives. Instead he cast it as women’s strength in the face of company assaults. His picture drew on an unassailable cultural value, that of women’s patient strength, and imbued it with the masculine honor accorded veterans. His comments are quite remarkable for their imagery, too. He felt “as a newborn”—interesting, given that he and his wife Braulia had a newborn at home; perhaps he was imagining his own child’s future in a more equitable society.

            Prodded by comrades like Ernesto Velásquez and, most importantly, forced by their wives, men ultimately stood behind the women’s picket even if they remained ambivalent. This unsteady commitment proved enough for the strike to succeed. In January 1952, the Empire Zinc Company finally returned to the negotiating table and agreed to a contract that granted many of the union’s demands. Some weeks later, the company quietly agreed to add indoor plumbing to all of its company houses—a demand raised as early as 1949, but one which the male negotiating committee had quickly abandoned when challenged.

Carrying the Struggle to a New Level

            It was the dramatic conflict between wives and husbands, in the course of a heroic fight of workers against management and against racism, that attracted blacklisted filmmakers to southwestern New Mexico in the summer of 1951. Recently expelled from Hollywood studios for refusing to disavow a Communist past, they wanted to project “real stories of real working people” onto the silver screen. And no better story appeared than the strike going on at that very moment in New Mexico. Salt of the Earth (1953) resulted from an unusual worker-artist collaboration in which screenwriter Michael Wilson consulted the families and changed the script in response to their reactions. The film was shot in Grant County, where a committee consisting of six representatives each from the film company, Local 890, and Auxiliary 209 managed the daily production work. The cast featured seven union members in leading roles and hundreds more in group scenes.[61]

            Mining families’ contributions to the movie took place at a moment when they had space to reflect on the strike; working on the film allowed them to work out what the women’s rebellion meant and to resolve, through an artistic medium, the contradictions and conflicts that still faced them. This process took place on an organizational level, too: in choosing two sets of representatives (from Local 890 and Auxiliary 209), union families recognized that no single perspective could claim to represent the whole community.

            Salt of the Earth tells the story of a fictional married couple, Ramón and Esperanza Quintero, who are driven apart when Esperanza joins the women’s picket. Ramón does not care to see women on the picket line. Not only does he disdain “hiding behind women’s skirts,” but he cannot bear having his authority eroded as Esperanza transforms herself from a meek housewife into a vibrant union activist. In the movie’s climax, Ramón confronts Esperanza after she returns from jail. They cannot “go on in this way,” he insists. Esperanza agrees, but concludes something quite different.

The Anglo bosses look down on you, and you hate them for it. “Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican”—that’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, “Stay in your place”? Do you feel better having someone lower than you? . . . Whose neck shall I stand on, to make me feel superior? And what will I get out of it? I don’t want anything lower then I am. I’m low enough already. I want to rise. And push everything up with me as I go.[62]

Ramón is furious and raises his hand to hit her. But Esperanza stands defiant, and he lowers his hand. “That would be the old way,” she tells him icily. “Never try it on me again—never.”[63]

            Salt of the Earth carried a powerful feminist message and prescient analysis of what later feminist theorists would call the intersections of race, class and gender. It owes much to the men and women of Independent Productions Corporation, especially screenwriter Michael Wilson, who marveled at the “battles for equality taking place there on so many levels [that he could] hardly unskein them” himself.[64] The movie’s opening scenes, for example, visually established the equal dignity and worth of women’s housework and men’s wage work, a perspective that probably came out of Wilson’s own discussions with fellow Communists about “the Woman Question.”[65] But the strong feminist message owes even more to the mining families’ own understandings of the changes they had undergone, and gender was the lens through which they wanted viewers to see them. If Wilson had Esperanza bravely confront her husband, it was because the women in Grant County told him to do so. His script reflected their recent history and the leverage they had gained in representing their strike. Performing the story of the strike—re-enacting more than acting, in Clinton Jencks’s words—allowed a cathartic and triumphant conclusion that settled the power relations between men and women, regardless of how such changes played out in real life.

            For the nature of the union community was not, in fact, a settled issue. Some women sensed a genuine and a permanent change; others found the changes between themselves and their husbands only temporary.[66] Ladies’ Auxiliary president Mariana Ramírez noted “a certain respect for the ladies” after the strike.[67] Dolores Jimenez continued to suffer abuse from her husband, yet she felt that the strike had made her “ten feet tall.” She stayed in her marriage for the sake of her children, and she always appreciated that her husband Frank was a good provider, even as he was having an affair with another woman. When Frank left her after the boys were grown up, she went to beauty school and opened her own shop.[68]

            The story of Chana and Cipriano Montoya shows some of the heartbreaking complexities of these changes. In 1954, Chana Montoya divorced her abusive husband, although they continued to live together off and on for several years. She finally broke off from him by moving to Los Angeles with their children in 1955, and soon she landed a job in a hospital. Cipriano was unhappy to see her go, and he followed her to Los Angeles. She did not want to return to New Mexico with him, and she quickly got a restraining order against him.[69] Then the story took a tragic turn. He waited for her at a bus stop one morning in July 1961, and he shot her dead when she approached. She was thirty-three years old. His defense: that his wife was a Communist, and he wanted to save his seven children from such an upbringing. He accused her of joining the Communist Party in 1948 and leading him into it as well. And from that moment, he said, “we had a very sorrowful marriage.” He resented her joining the Empire Zinc picket, attributing her participation entirely to a supposed Communist Party order. It made him angry, for “it was no job for a woman.”[70] Moreover, he claimed that authorities at a Party school had charged him in the mid-1950s with “exercising undue ‘masculine control’ over his wife.” Montoya was convicted and imprisoned. Upon release he told Virginia and Juan Chacón that he had been forced to testify in that manner. He ended up committing suicide.

Conclusion

            The Empire Zinc strike and Salt of the Earth together show how gender mattered in the power structures that operated both across class lines and within the working class, and in the union whose mission was to transform those structures of power. Gender served as an organizing principle for the union’s activities until an unusual situation, the injunction, propelled women to the center of the strike. Mining wives’ awareness of the interdependent nature of the family, and their appreciation of the contributions they made through the work that defined each day of their lives, proved essential to their ability to imagine, contemplate, and eventually insist upon playing an active and ultimately transformative role in the Empire Zinc strike. Men’s sense that their family authority was linked to the union’s power made it hard for them to picture even a temporary inversion of family responsibilities as anything other than an irreversible diminution of men’s authority; men’s reaction ensured that this inversion brought gender relations into focus for union men and women. It was this story that strikers wanted to share with an audience, and making Salt of the Earth was an unusual opportunity to reflect on changes that had taken place and to imagine a “new way” in which men and women could regard each other as equals.

Originally published in Mining Women: Gender in the Development of a Global Industry, 1670–2000, ed. Jaclyn Gier and Laurie Mercier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Reproduced with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

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[1] Silver City Daily Press (hereafter cited as SCDP), June 13, 1951.

[2] In 1947 Congress passed, over President Truman’s veto, the Labor-Management Relations Act, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Taft-Hartley affirmed workers’ right not to join a union, made it easier to get a court injunction against strikers—a return to the years before the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, which had limited such injunctions—and specified unfair labor practices thenceforth forbidden to unions. It required all union officials to sign affidavits stating that they did not belong to the Communist Party. Those unions that did not file non-communist affidavits lost access to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leaders refused to sign these affidavits for over a year; Mine-Mill and other left-wing unions held out even longer. Anticommunism was more than a weapon of the companies; political battles over communism and anticommunism tore many unions apart during this period. For this process in Mine-Mill, see Vernon H. Jensen, Nonferrous Metals Industry Unionism, 1932–1954: A Story of Leadership Controversy, Cornell Studies in Industrial and Labor Relations, vol. 5 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954.)

[3] Mining companies operating in Grant County refused to negotiate with Mine-Mill and fostered “independent” union organizing, hinting that its workers should be “good Americans.” (The term good Americans, of course, referred both to non-communists and non-aliens.) Letter from Clinton Jencks to Maurice Travis, June 26, 1948, Western Federation of Miners/International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Collection, box 868, folder 9, Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Boulder (hereafter cited as Mine-Mill Papers), box 867, folder 1; SCDP, June 24, June 30, and August 20, 1948; Arthur Flores, B.G. Provencio, José T. Morales, and Clinton Jencks to W.H. Goodrich, July 10, 1948, in Mine-Mill Papers, box 870, folder 7.

[4] Clinton Jencks, telephone interview by author, May 10, 1997; Lorenzo Tórrez, interview by author, tape recording, October 4, 1995, Tucson. Grant County’s biggest operation was Kennecott’s open-pit copper mine in Santa Rita, accompanied by its smelter in Hurley. American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), Peru Mining Company, U.S. Smelting, Refining, and Mining Company, and Empire Zinc all ran lead-zinc mines in the towns of Hanover, Vanadium, and Bayard.

[5] Braulia Velásquez, quoted in Proceedings of the 48th Convention of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Nogales, Arizona, September 10-15, 1951 (Denver: International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers), 64; Aurora Chávez, telephone interview by author, May 9, 1997. Chávez was married to Empire Zinc striker Agustín Chávez; Chacón to Hurley worker Juan Chacón, and Jencks to union organizer Clinton Jencks.

[6] Anita Tórrez, interview by author, tape recording, Tucson, Arizona, October 4, 1995.

[7] Aurora Chávez interview; Virginia Chacón, interview by author, tape recording, Faywood, New Mexico, September 30, 1995.

[8] Historian Jack Cargill reports that the discussion split along gender lines, with International representatives Bob Hollowwa and Clinton Jencks joining the women. Jack Cargill, “Empire and Opposition: The ‘Salt of the Earth’ Strike,” in Robert Kern, ed., Labor in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 203.

[9] Anita Tórrez interview.

[10] Braulia Velásquez, quoted in 1951 Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 64.

[11] Ernesto Velásquez, quoted in ibid. A few women and children had already begun picketing casually with men even before the injunction, but women’s picketing on a large scale presented quite a different picture to men’s (and women’s) imaginations.

[12] SCDP, June 13, 1951.

[13] Cargill, 204.

[14] Minutes of Local 890, International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, June 14, 1951, Mine-Mill Papers, box 868, book 9.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Dolores Jiménez, interview by author and Sam Sills, March 2, 2003, Santa Fe, N.M.

[17] SCDP, June 11, 1951.

[18] Anita Tórrez and Lorenzo Tórrez interview; Elena Tafoya and Daría Chávez, interview by author, tape recording, Hanover, New Mexico, March 14, 1996.

[19] Local 890 minutes, June 14 and 28, 1951; and Local 890 press and radio release, July 24, 1951, Mine-Mill Papers, box 873, envelope 1.

[20] Local 890 minutes, June 28, 1951.

[21] James K. Richardson, Address to 1946 Meeting of New Mexico Miners and Prospectors Association, reprinted in New Mexico Miner and Prospector (June 1946), 4. Richardson was a labor relations specialist at Kennecott’s Utah operations, and in the early 1950s he was transferred to New Mexico.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Clinton Jencks interview.

[24] In general, the Communist Party held that women’s oppression would evaporate under the enlightened conditions of socialism; “feminism” meant one thing—the bourgeois feminism that masked real class relations and sacrificed working-class women for their bourgeois “sisters.”

[25] Virginia Chacón interview.

[26] Mine-Mill Auxiliary women from the United States and Canada reported that women in other auxiliaries were astonished by, and jealous of, women’s voting rights in Mine-Mill. See Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 1942 and 1944. Women probably exercised this right only in circumstances that already favored it and on issues already deemed to concern them; that is, it was a formal right that only occasionally, and imperfectly, became a substantive right.

[27] Virginia Chacón interview.

[28] Patricia Yeghissian, “Emergence of the Red Berets,” Michigan Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies 10 (Winter 1980), 1-2.

[29] Aurora Chávez interview.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Miners’ wives daily felt the power of companies, which often controlled housing, utilities, and social institutions like schools. Every aspect of their own household work bore the marks of class and ethnic injustice. Only the “Anglo” houses in Kennecott’s two company towns, Santa Rita and Hurley, had running water; Mexican American tenants had to haul water from wells. Hanover, the site of the Empire Zinc strike, was similarly segregated. As Anita Tórrez complained, “Empire thinks us second class citizens—no plumbing as in Anglo houses.” Anita Tórrez, letter to editor, Silver City Daily Press, April 5, 1951.

[32] Children did whatever chores they could handle; teenagers went either to school or to work depending on their family’s situation and their parents’ decisions.

[33] Manuscript Census, Precincts 11 and 16, Grant County, N.M., Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, in National Archives Microfilm Collection T-626-1395. 1930 is the most recent date for which the manuscript census is available, and the statistical abstracts for 1940 and 1950 do not indicate the sex of heads of household for Grant County or its subdivisions.

[34] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982).

[35] Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Penguin, 1988), v-vi.

[36] Aurora Chávez interview.

[37] Local 890 minutes, June 14, 1951.

[38] Domestic abuse was rarely on the public radar screen, but it set the terms for many families’ power relations. Dolores Jiménez, for example, dealt with Frank’s violence by running out of the house. She did not want to leave him permanently, even though she knew he was also unfaithful to her, because he was a good provider.

[39] Local 890 minutes, October 17, 1951.

[40] El Paso Herald-Post, June 16, 1951; Virginia Chacón, quoted in 1951 Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 63.

[41] Virginia Chacón, quoted in ibid.

[42] SCDP, June 16, 1951.

[43] New York Times, June 17, 1951, 26; SCDP, June 16, 1951.

[44] New York Times, June 17, 1951, 26; Virginia Chacón, 1951 Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 63.

[45] New York Times, June 18, 1951.

[46] SCDP, June 18, 1951. All forty-five women pleaded not guilty to the charge of unlawful assembly and were released pending trial. Not charged were children under the age of sixteen. One girl complained: “But I fought the sheriffs. I fought ‘em good. I hit one real hard and I spit in another’s eye.”

[47] SCDP, July 12 and 13, 1951.

[48] Juárez was none other than Aurora Chávez’s sister, who had been sent to Hanover by their father to help Aurora with the children.

[49] SCDP, July 13, 1951.

[50] SCDP, August 23, 1951.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Local 890 press and radio release, August 23, 1951, Mine-Mill Papers, box 873, envelope 1.

[53] Ibid., and SCDP, August 23, 1951.

[54] Local 890 press and radio releases, August 23 and 25, 1951; SCDP, August 23, 1951.

[55] Local 890 minutes, June 28, 1951.

[56] Local 890 press and radio release, July 27, 1951.

[57] Local 890 press and radio release, August 10, 1951.

[58] Bob Hollowwa, Clinton Jencks, and Cipriano Montoya to Maurice Travis et al. re: Empire Zinc strike, etc., August 19, 1951, Mine-Mill Papers, box 294, folder 11.

[59] Ernesto Velásquez, quoted in 1951 Mine-Mill Convention Proceedings, 64.

[60] Local 890 minutes, October 17, 1951.

[61] Juan Chacón, Henrietta Williams, Angie Sánchez, Joe T. Morales, Clorinda Alderette, and Charles Coleman played seven of the eight leading roles. Rosaura Revueltas, an award-winning Mexican actress, played the lead female role, Esperanza.

[62] Michael Wilson and Deborah Rosenfelt, Salt of the Earth (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1978), 81-2.

[63] Ibid., 82.

[64] Herbert Biberman, Salt of the Earth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 39. Biberman directed the movie, which was in many ways a family affair: his sister-in-law, Sonja Dahl Biberman, served on the production committee; producer Paul Jarrico was Wilson’s brother-in-law, and his wife Sylvia worked on the film production as well. The Jarricos had first discovered the Empire Zinc strike in the summer of 1951, when they met the Jenckses at a ranch in northern New Mexico.

[65] The Woman Question was Wilson’s first title for the screenplay, and hardly anyone besides Communists continued to use this nineteenth-century term. Based on her interviews with several of the people involved with Salt, Deborah Rosenfelt suggests that the Hollywood Communist Party clubs were more likely to discuss women’s issues, including housework, than were CP clubs elsewhere. Wilson and Rosenfelt, Salt of the Earth, 102.

[66] See Deborah Rosenfelt’s interviews with women picketers in Salt of the Earth, 142-43.

[67] Mariana Ramírez, quoted in Deborah Rosenfelt, Salt of the Earth, 142.

[68] Frank’s reputation among men was hurt—not by his infidelity, or even his leaving a wife, but for taking the furniture and cutting her out of his insurance; the breadwinner ethic had hardly disappeared, but it took on new aspects. Dolores Jiménez interview.

[69] SCDP, July 26, 1961.

[70] Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1961; SCDP, August 25, 1961.