They Deported Her Before She Could Finish the Movie

The strike at the Empire Zinc mine in Hanover, New Mexico, ended in January 1952. Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers had held for fifteen months. The women of the community had held the picket line after a Taft-Hartley injunction barred the male miners from it. They won.

Two years later, a small crew of blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers finished a movie about that strike. What the Cold War did to that movie is its own story, and it runs alongside the strike like a shadow.

The three men at the center of the production had each paid a price before the camera rolled. Herbert Biberman, the director, was one of the Hollywood Ten. He had served six months in federal prison for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Paul Jarrico, the producer, and Michael Wilson, the screenwriter, had each been blacklisted from the studios. They made Salt of the Earth because no one with industry standing would make it, using funding they assembled outside the studio system and a cast drawn largely from the actual striking miners and their families.

Congress moved against the film before production was complete. In January 1953, Congressman Donald Jackson of California took the floor of the House of Representatives and denounced Salt of the Earth as communist propaganda. He demanded it be stopped. The film was still shooting in New Mexico.

The following month, immigration authorities arrived on set and arrested Rosaura Revueltas, the Mexican actress cast as the lead. They deported her to Mexico before she could finish her scenes. Biberman traveled south to complete her close-ups under improvised conditions in Mexico. The film was finished anyway.

The distribution was a different kind of wall. The major Hollywood studios refused to touch it. Roy Brewer, the anti-communist head of IATSE in Hollywood, had spent months pressuring technicians not to work on the production and pressuring theater owners not to show it. IATSE projectionists, organized under Brewer's influence, refused to run the film in most American theaters. In 1954, Salt of the Earth was shown in thirteen theaters in the United States.

J. Edgar Hoover personally sent a memo on the film to the State Department. The FBI had monitored the production throughout.

Rosaura Revueltas was never given another major Hollywood role. The deportation and the blacklist together ended her career in the country where the film was made.

A print survived in France. For years it circulated mostly in Europe and in American university film series, outside the commercial distribution system that had killed its initial release. In 1992, when the Library of Congress established its National Film Registry for films that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant," Salt of the Earth was among the first titles added.

The strike won. The film was buried for three decades. The same Cold War logic that sent Hoover's memo to the State Department had already kicked Mine-Mill out of the CIO in 1950 for being, in the language of the day, "communist-led." What the apparatus could not do in Hanover, it did in every theater in the country.

Sources

• 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)
• Ellen Baker, On Strike and on Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
• Michael Wilson and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, Salt of the Earth (Feminist Press, 1978): screenplay with Rosenfelt's production history essay
• Library of Congress National Film Registry, complete listing