Salt of the Earth

Released in 1954, Salt of the Earth is a film about the mostly Mexican American miners of the Empire Zinc [Page 1255]Company in New Mexico who struck from 1950 to 1952. The film was directed by Herbert Biberman, one of the so-called Hollywood Ten. Salt's producer, Paul Jarrico, and its screenwriter, Michael Wilson, were also victims of the Hollywood blacklist. Forced to work outside of the studio system, Salt was made in cooperation with Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW); many of those appearing in the film, including the male lead, Juan Chacón, were miners, not professional actors.

Salt is not only an uplifting story of oppressed workers challenging the power of industry and the corporate state, it is also a penetrating critique of racism and sexism in Cold War America. In the film, Mexican American workers were restricted to below-ground jobs, and they lived in substandard company housing that lacked running water and indoor toilets. When a Taft-Hartley injunction prevented the striking miners from walking the picket line, the women of the community, countering both custom and machismo, took their places.

Salt is often called the only blacklisted film in American history. Given the filmmakers' earlier defiance of Congress and their collaboration with the IUMMSW, the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried, without success, to establish a Communist Party connection. Hollywood Reporter columnist Mike Connally nevertheless charged Salt with being made by communists under orders from the Kremlin. Representative Donald Jackson, a California Republican, denounced the film as a communist-made incitement to race hatred that he would work tirelessly to keep out of American movie theaters. Chapters of the American Legion announced a boycott.

Trouble not surprisingly plagued Salt's production. The actor originally poised to play the male lead, Rodolfo Acosta, pulled out when pressured by the Hollywood studios. Anti-communist vigilantes assaulted the filmmakers and members of Local 890. Planes regularly buzzed overhead. The film's female lead, Rosaura Revueltas, a Mexican national, was incarcerated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service before Salt was completed and was ultimately deported; she was subsequently blacklisted by both the American and Mexican film industries.

Once filming ended, Salt faced trouble from obstinate technicians and projectionists, who refused to process or show it. The film eventually opened in New York, but theater owners in Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere caved under pressure. Although suppressed in the United States in the 1950s, the film proved popular in Europe, winning awards in Czechoslovakia and France. The film did not reemerge in the United States until the 1960s, when it found an audience among young leftists, scholars, and members of the Chicano community. During the strike against grape growers of that same decade, the United Farm Workers regularly showed Salt to boost the morale of its membership.

In 1992 the Library of Congress placed Salt on its prestigious National Film Registry, thus ensuring that a print would be preserved for eternity. New York's Museum of Modern Art has similarly preserved a copy.