Salt of the Earth

Banned!

The film the U.S. government didn't want you to see!

Made during the height of the McCarthy era by a group of blacklisted filmmakers who were among the best and the brightest Hollywood talent of the day, Salt of the Earth is a powerful and emotionally charged feature length film.

Salt of the Earth is based on an actual 1950 strike by zinc miners in Silver City, New Mexico. All but five of the cast and crew were local people, including members of the miners’ union who had taken part in the strike.

Against a backdrop of social injustice, a riveting family drama is played out by the characters of Ramon and Esperanza Quintero, a Mexican-American miner and his wife. In the course of the strike, Ramon and Esperanza find their roles reversed: an injunction against the male strikers moves the women to take over the picket line, leaving the men to domestic duties. The women evolve from men's subordinates into their allies and equals.

The film hit a lot of other hot buttons. The story focused on striking miners, who, in the press, were called either communists or communist-influenced, and it focused on a Chicano community at a time when the flames of racism were openly being fanned against them. Throughout the Great Depression, official attitudes toward Mexican immigration and trans-border migration had grown increasingly hostile, encouraging Anglos in the depressed economy to demand jobs that had traditionally belonged to Mexican immigrants. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, government moves towards closing the border at the Rio Grande had culminated in "Operation Wetback" in 1953, a U.S. program designed to find and deport Mexican immigrants without proper papers. Of course, many "Mexican-American immigrants" had, in fact, been on their lands longer than those lands had been a part of the United States, forced to become U.S. citizens by the annexation of their land after the Mexican American War in 1848.

For fear of destruction by "anti-communist" technicians, the film stock had to be smuggled into development labs and worked on in secret! Director Herbert J. Bieberman was arrested during filming, and had to give scene directions by letter and telephone while in prison. During the course of production, the trade press denounced it as a subversive plot and vigilantes fired rifle shots at the set. The FBI deported the film's star, Rosaura Revueltas, midway through filming (insert footage was subsequently and illegally shot in Mexico, where political pressure succeeded in banning the film's production there as well) and after the movie managed to be completed, the industry's projectionists' union refused to screen it. The film, edited in secret, was stored for safekeeping in an anonymous wooden shack in Los Angeles.

The film was denounced by the House of Representatives, and the FBI investigated its financing. The American Legion called for a nation-wide boycott. The final result was that The Salt of the Earth was almost never shown in the United States.

NOW, as our first-amendment rights are being trampled, and racism, sexism and scapegoating immigrants are part of our daily dose of propaganda from the media, this seems to be just the right time to show this powerful movie.

WATCH A BRIEF CLIP FROM THE MOVIE:

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