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"Salt of the Earth" (1954) features a predominantly Mexican American cast and shows that questions of race and class are inseparable from gender. Its production was contested in the US and caused an international incident with Mexico. Brief thread on its history.
The film is based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. The cast was mostly comprised of actual miners and their families. The film’s writer, director, and producer had all been blacklisted due to their alleged Communist affiliations.
Californian politician Donald Jackson claimed that the film was "a new weapon for Russia", "deliberately designed to inflame racial hatreds and to depict the United States of America as the enemy of all colored peoples."
The film also got critiques from the labor movement: Harry Bridges himself complained, "Why did you have to bring in the woman question? Why couldn't you have made a straight film?"
Due to unfounded fears that the film would threaten zinc production and, by extension, the US war effort in Korea, mobs attacked the set and its actors. Labs refused to process the film and the editing had to be carried out in secret.
The film’s lead female actress, Rosaura Revueltas, hailed from Mexico and the legality of her presence in the US came under scrutiny by immigration officials. She was temporarily jailed, then deported to Mexico. 
The Mexican National Actors Association led by Golden Age film star Jorge Negrete protested her arrest and threatened to retaliate by re-examining the papers of American actors working in Mexico at the time, including Gary Cooper.
Revueltas observed that "[s]ince [the INS] had no evidence to present of my 'subversive' character, I can only conclude that I was 'dangerous' because I had been playing a role that gave status and dignity to the character of a Mexican American woman."
Revueltas recorded remaining narration for the film “under clandestine circumstances in a dismantled Mexican sound studio. The crew shot final footage of her in Mexico and then smuggled it like contraband over the border.”
historynet.com/salt-of-the-ea…
historynet.com/salt-of-the-ea…
In attempt to smooth things over, Mexico’s Miguel Alemán administration made an agreement with the US that Revueltas would be banned from acting in Mexico as well. The international scandal was resolved but Revueltas’s acting career was effectively over.
Though the film has been largely forgotten, it was decades ahead of its time in dignifying feminist thought, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism and essentially made an early case for the importance of intersectionality.
See it on the big screen in Seattle this Sunday thanks to @SeattleDSA:
seattledsa.org/event/cineprax…
or any time for free online:
seattledsa.org/event/cineprax…
or any time for free online:
Full "Salt of the Earth" thread:
