The Case the Union Won in Silence

Empire Zinc paid two wages for the same labor. In Bayard, New Mexico, in 1950, the company's books recorded one wage for Anglo miners and a lower one for Mexican-American miners doing the same work underground. The company-owned houses told the same story. Anglo housing had indoor plumbing. Mexican-American housing did not.

This was the grievance on which Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local 890 struck Empire Zinc on October 17, 1950. The union represented roughly 100 Mexican-American miners in a corner of Grant County where zinc had been mined for decades and where the labor hierarchy tracked the racial one. Mine-Mill had been expelled from the CIO that same year on charges of Communist ties, which made federal pressure a given and a long fight likely. The union went out anyway.

The fight was fifteen months. The company held. The union held. Then, in June 1951, a federal district court granted Empire Zinc a Taft-Hartley injunction. The miners were barred from picketing. The injunction was the company's bet: no picket line, no morale, no strike.

What happened next was decided in a union hall.

Local 890 called a meeting. The men voted to ask the women of the Mine-Mill Women's Auxiliary to take the line. The women had been organized before the strike started, dues paid, leadership in place. They said yes. In late June 1951, wives, mothers, and daughters of the striking miners walked onto the picket line at Empire Zinc's gate.

The company and the county sheriff treated it as a problem to be cleared. Deputies arrested the women in large numbers. Women brought their children. The jail in Silver City filled up. Virginia Chacón, whose husband Juan led the local, was among the most visible on the line and among those arrested. They were released and returned to the picket. The arrests did not break the line. They made it harder to ignore.

The injunction had been designed to end a strike by removing the men who called it. It could not remove the women who chose to hold it. That distinction is the labor history. The Taft-Hartley Act, used by employers against union after union in the postwar decade, met in Bayard something it had not been designed for: a community that understood the line as belonging to everyone.

The strike was settled in January 1952. The dual-wage system was addressed. Some of the plumbing demands were met. Mine-Mill Local 890 had held for fifteen months against a federal injunction, a hostile county government, and a company that had every reason to believe it would outlast them.

Two years later, in 1954, blacklisted Hollywood filmmaker Herbert Biberman made a film about the strike with the strikers themselves in most of the roles. That film is its own story, including its own suppression. The strike is the one that matters here.

The long-form drops Saturday, October 17.

Sources

• Jack Cargill, "Empire and Opposition: The 'Salt of the Earth' Strike," in Labor in New Mexico: Unions, Strikes, and Social History Since 1881, ed. Robert Kern (University of New Mexico Press, 1983)
• Ellen R. Baker, On Strike and On Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
• James J. Lorence, The Suppression of 'Salt of the Earth': How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (University of New Mexico Press, 1999)
• Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local 890 records, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research