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Reviews
| On Strike and On Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America. By Ellen R. Baker. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. viii + 180 pp. Maps, photos, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
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In this well-researched and strongly argued study, Ellen R. Baker expands our knowledge of the Empire Zinc strike with a penetrating analysis of the New Mexico mining community that fought this battle and its role in the production of the landmark film Salt of the Earth (1954). Baker provides a richly textured account of a struggle that contributed to the rejection of atavistic "old ways" of gender relations and the growth of determined worker resistance to management in the postwar copper industry. |
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This work advances discussion of the Empire Zinc story with a sophisticated examination of the Grant County Mexican American community of the late 1940s—in particular, the historic development of its strong ties to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill), a labor organization that linked class exploitation to racial discrimination while offering progressive solutions to economic and social problems. As Baker notes, the new militancy was the product of local working-class agency more than external initiative, an insight that becomes one of the book's key themes. |
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Along with heightened ethnic consciousness, a new style of interpersonal relations developed within the union families. Once women asserted a demand for equal treatment, a new set of issues confronted Mine-Mill's Local 890. Such heightened self-awareness exposed contradictions as both women and men attempted to grapple with changes in the "old way." |
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