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

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

by Ellen R. Baker
On Strike and on Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America

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

by Ellen R. Baker

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Overview

In 1950, Mexican American miners went on strike for fair working conditions in Hanover, New Mexico. When an injunction prohibited miners from picketing, their wives took over the picket lines--an unprecedented act that disrupted mining families but ultimately ensured the strikers' victory in 1952. In On Strike and on Film, Ellen Baker examines the building of a leftist union that linked class justice to ethnic equality. She shows how women's participation in union activities paved the way for their taking over the picket lines and thereby forcing their husbands, and the union, to face troubling questions about gender equality.

Baker also explores the collaboration between mining families and blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers that resulted in the controversial 1954 film Salt of the Earth. She shows how this worker-artist alliance gave the mining families a unique chance to clarify the meanings of the strike in their own lives and allowed the filmmakers to create a progressive alternative to Hollywood productions. An inspiring story of working-class solidarity, Mexican American dignity, and women's liberation, Salt of the Earth was itself blacklisted by powerful anticommunists, yet the movie has endured as a vital contribution to American cinema.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469606545
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 09/01/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 368
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Ellen R. Baker is associate professor of history at Columbia University.

Table of Contents


Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Grant County's Mining District

Part I. Crisis

Chapter 3. Class Conflict in the Mines, 1930-1950

Chapter 4. Competing Models of Unionism

Part II. The Women's Picket

Chapter 5. Political Consciousness and Community Formation

Chapter 6. Household Relations

Part III. A Worker-Artist Alliance

Chapter 7. The Blacklist

Chapter 8. A Progressive Vision of Popular Culture

Chapter 9. Anticommunist Assaults

Chapter 10. Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This is the first treatment of Salt of the Earth that focuses squarely on the participants in the 1951 strike on which the film is based. Drawing on over twenty oral interviews, Ellen Baker has reconstructed with great care and nuance the day-to-day life of Mexican American mining families before and after the arrival of the Hollywood film crew. On Strike and on Film is a compelling and provocative contribution across several fields, including Latina/o history, labor history, American Studies, and U.S. women's history.—Vicki L. Ruiz, University of California, Irvine

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