Issue date: 2/19/07 Section: Arts

"How shall I begin my story that has no beginning? My name is…Esperanza Quintero. I am a miner's wife. This is our home. The house is not ours. But the flowers... the flowers are ours. This is my village. When I was a child, it was called San Marcos. The Anglos changed the name to Zinc Town. Zinc Town, New Mexico, U.S.A. Our roots go deep in this place, deeper than the pines, deeper than the mine shaft. In these arroyos my great grandfather raised cattle before the Anglos ever came. The land where the mine stands - that was owned by my husband's own grandfather. Now it belongs to the company. Eighteen years my husband has given to that mine. Living half his life with dynamite and darkness. Who can say where it began, my story? I do not know. But this day I remember as the beginning of an end. It was my Saint's Day. I was thirty-five years old. A day of celebration. And I was seven months gone with my third child. And on that day - I remember I had a wish... a thought so sinful...... a thought so evil that I prayed God to forgive me for it. I wished... I wished that my child would never be born. No. Not into this world."-Opening Narration

Despite the immortal words of 1970s activist poet-musician Gil-Scott Heron, the revolution was televised-in 1954's Salt of the Earth. Based on an actual strike against the Empire Zinc Mine in New Mexico and filmed using actual Union members, the film was blacklisted and banned by the US government during the 1950s

Communist scare, which sought to root out "un-American activities."

The horrifying irony is that the film's content couldn't be more American: ethnic and gender equality, the right to work for a fair living wage and the rights to work and live in conditions that promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This film was written, directed and produced by members of the original "Hollywood Ten," who were blacklisted for refusing to answer Congressional inquiries on First Amendment grounds. We still see this irony today in the current administration's post-9/11 denouncement of any criticism as "unpatriotic." The power and message of Salt of the Earth isn't confined to history; we're still fighting the issues raised and fought for so courageously by Esperanza Quintero, her husband Ramon and the workers of the Local 890 in Salt of the Earth.

The movie primarily deals with the prejudice against Mexican-American workers, who struck to attain wage parity with Anglo workers, decent housing and safe working conditions. This strikes an eerie parallel with the current battle over the estimated 11 million undocumented workers in this country-many of whom are Latin-American, most of whom make sub-standard wages and who live, in some cases, in conditions as bad as those portrayed in the movie.

Continued...

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