El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan: In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal "gringo" invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano, Mexican, Latino, Indiginous inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our sangre is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny. We are free and sovereign to determine those tasks which are justly called for by our house, our land, the sweat of our brows, and by our hearts. Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner "gabacho" who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan. For La Raza to do. Fuera de La Raza nada. Program El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan sets the theme that the Chicanos (La Raza de Bronze) must use their nationalism as the key or common denominator for mass mobilization and organization. Once we are committed to the idea and philosophy of El Plan de Aztlan, we can only conclude that social, economic, cultural, and political independence is the only road to total liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism. Our struggle then must be for the control of our barrios, campos, pueblos, lands, our economy, our culture, and our political life. El Plan commits all levels of Chicano society - the barrio, the campo, the ranchero, the writer, the teacher, the worker, the professional - to La Causa. Nationalism Nationalism as the key to organization transcends all religious, political, class, and economic factions or boundaries. Nationalism is the common denominator that all members of La Raza can agree upon. Organizational Goals 1. UNITY in the thinking of our people concerning the barrios, the pueblo, the campo, the land, the poor, the middle class, the professional-all committed to the liberation of La Raza. 2. ECONOMY: economic control of our lives and our communities can only come about by driving the exploiter out of our communities, our pueblos, and our lands and by controlling and developing our own talents, sweat, and resources. Cultural background and values which ignore materialism and embrace humanism will contribute to the act of cooperative buying and the distribution of resources and production to sustain an economic base for healthy growth and development Lands rightfully ours will be fought for and defended. Land and realty ownership will be acquired by the community for the people's welfare. Economic ties of responsibility must be secured by nationalism and the Chicano defense units. 3. EDUCATION must be relative to our people, i.e., history, culture, bilingual education, contributions, etc. Community control of our schools, our teachers, our administrators, our counselors, and our programs. 4. INSTITUTIONS shall serve our people by providing the service necessary for a full life and their welfare on the basis of restitution, not handouts or beggar's crumbs. Restitution for past economic slavery, political exploitation, ethnic and cultural psychological destruction and denial of civil and human rights. Institutions in our community which do not serve the people have no place in the community. The institutions belong to the people. 5. SELF-DEFENSE of the community must rely on the combined strength of the people. The front line defense will come from the barrios, the campos, the pueblos, and the ranchitos. Their involvement as protectors of their people will be given respect and dignity. They in turn offer their responsibility and their lives for their people. Those who place themselves in the front ranks for their people do so out of love and carnalismo. Those institutions which are fattened by our brothers to provide employment and political pork barrels for the gringo will do so only as acts of liberation and for La Causa. For the very young there will no longer be acts of juvenile delinquency, but revolutionary acts. 6. CULTURAL values of our people strengthen our identity and the moral backbone of the movement. Our culture unites and educates the family of La Raza towards liberation with one heart and one mind. We must insure that our writers, poets, musicians, and artists produce literature and art that is appealing to our people and relates to our revolutionary culture. Our cultural values of life, family, and home will serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood. 7. POLITICAL LIBERATION can only come through independent action on our part, since the two-party system is the same animal with two heads that feed from the same trough. Where we are a majority, we will control; where we are a minority, we will represent a pressure group; nationally, we will represent one party: La Familia de La Raza! Action 1. Awareness and distribution of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan. Presented at every meeting, demonstration, confrontation, courthouse, institution, administration, church, school, tree, building, car, and every place of human existence. 2. September 16, on the birth date of Mexican Independence, a national walk-out by all Chicanos of all colleges and schools to be sustained until the complete revision of the educational system: its policy makers, administration, its curriculum, and its personnel to meet the needs of our community. 3. Self-Defense against the occupying forces of the oppressors at every school, every available man, woman, and child. 4. Community nationalization and organization of all Chicanos: El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan. 5. Economic program to drive the exploiter out of our community and a welding together of our people's combined resources to control their own production through cooperative effort. 6. Creation of an independent local, regional, and national political party. A nation autonomous and free - culturally, socially, economically, and politically- will make its own decisions on the usage of our lands, the taxation of our goods, the utilization of our bodies for war, the determination of justice (reward and punishment), and the profit of our sweat. El Plan de Aztlan is the plan of liberation! 5/19/2019 The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend — EFNIKS.com http://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend 1/8 5/19/2019 The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend — EFNIKS.com http://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend 2/8 5/19/2019 The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend — EFNIKS.com http://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend 3/8 5/19/2019 The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend — EFNIKS.com http://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend 4/8 5/19/2019 The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend — EFNIKS.com http://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend 5/8 5/19/2019 The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend — EFNIKS.com http://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend 6/8 5/19/2019 The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend — EFNIKS.com http://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend 7/8 5/19/2019 The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not A Trend — EFNIKS.com http://efniks.com/the-deep-dive-pages/2018/9/11/the-x-in-latinx-is-a-wound-not-a-trend 8/8 Letter from Delano By Cesar Chavez Good Friday 1969 E.L. Barr, Jr., President California Grape and Tree Fruit League 717 Market St., San Francisco, California Dear Mr. Barr: I am sad to hear about your accusations in the press that our union movement and table grape boycott have been successful because we have used violence and terror tactics. If what you say is true, I have been a failure and should withdraw from the struggle; but you are left with the awesome moral responsibility, before God and man, to come forward with whatever information you have so that corrective action can begin at once. If for any reason you fail to come forth to substantiate your charges, then you must be held responsible for committing violence against us, albeit violence of the tongue. I am convinced that you as a human being did not mean what you said but rather acted hastily under pressure from the public relations firm that has been hired to try to counteract the tremendous moral force of our movement. How many times we ourselves have felt the need to lash out in anger and bitterness. Today on Good Friday 1969 we remember the life and the sacrifice of Martin Luther King, J r . ,whog a v ehi ms e l ft ot a l l yt ot henonv i ol e nts t r u g g l ef orpe a c ea ndj u s t i c e .I nhi s“ Letter from Birmingham Jail”Dr .Ki ngde s c r i be sbe t t e rt ha nIc ou l dou rhope sf ort hes t r i k ea nd boy c ot t :“ I nj u s t i c emu s tbee x pos e d,wi t ha l lt het e ns i onsi t se x pos u r ec r e a t e s ,t ot hel i g ht ofhu ma nc ons c i e nc ea ndt hea i rofna t i ona l opi ni onbe f or ei tc a nbec u r e d. ”Forour part I admit that we have seized upon every tactic and strategy consistent with the morality of our cause to expose that injustice and thus to heighten the sensitivity of the American conscience so that farm workers will have without bloodshed their own union and the dignity of bargaining with their agribusiness employers. By lying about the nature of our movement, Mr. Barr, you are working against nonviolent social change. Unwittingly perhaps, you may unleash that other force which our union by discipline and deed, censure and education has sought to avoid, that panacea shortcut, that senseless violence which honors no color, class or neighborhood. You must understand –I must make you understand –that our membership and the hopes and aspirations of the hundreds of thousands of the poor and dispossessed that have been raised on our account are, above all, human beings, no better and no worse than any other cross-section of human society; we are not saints because we are poor, but by the same measure neither are we immoral. We are men and women who have suffered and endured much, and not only because of our abject poverty but because we have been kept poor. The colors of our skins, the languages of our cultural and native origins, the lack of formal education, the exclusion from the democratic process, the numbers of our men slain in recent wars –all these burdens generation after generation have sought to demoralize us, to break our human spirit. But God knows that we are not beasts of burden, agricultural implements, or rented slaves; we are men. And mark this well, Mr. Barr, we are men locked i nade a t hs t r u g g l ea g a i ns tma n’ si nhu ma ni t yt oma ni nt hei ndu s t r yt ha ty our e pr e s e nt . And this struggle itself gives meaning to our life and ennobles our dying. As your industry has experienced, our strikers here in Delano and those who represent us throughout the world are well trained for this struggle. They have been under the gun, they have been kicked and beaten and herded by dogs, they have been cursed and ridiculed, they have been stripped and chained and jailed, they have been sprayed with the poisons used in the vineyards; but they have been taught not to lie down and die nor to flee in shame, but to resist with every ounce of human endurance and spirit. To resist not with retaliation in kind but to overcome with love and compassion, with ingenuity and creativity, with hard work and longer hours, with stamina and patient tenacity, with truth and public appeal, with friends and allies, with nobility and discipline, with politics and law, and with prayer and fasting. They were not trained in a month or even a year; after all, this new harvest season will mark our fourth full year of strike and even now we continue to plan and prepare for the years to come. Time accomplishes for the poor what money does for the rich. This is not to pretend that we have everywhere been successful enough or that we have not made mistakes. And while we do not belittle or underestimate our adversaries –for they are the rich and the powerful and they possess the land –we are not afraid nor do we cringe from the confrontation. We welcome it! We have planned for it! We know that our cause is just, that history is a story of social revolution, and that the poor shall inherit the land. Once again, I appeal to you as the representative of your industry and as a man. I ask you to recognize and bargain with our union before the economic pressure of the boycott and strike takes an irrevocable toll; but if not, I ask you to at least sit down with us to discuss the safeguards necessary to keep our historical struggle free of violence. I make this appeal because as one of the leaders of our nonviolent movement, I know and accept my responsibility for preventing, if possible, the destruction of human life and property. For t he s er e a s ons ,a ndk nowi ngofGa ndhi ’ sa dmoni t i ont ha tf a s t i ngi st hel a s tr e s or ti npl a c e of the sword, during a most critical time in our movement last February 1968 I undertook a 25-day fast. I repeat to you the principle enunciated to the membership at the start of the fast: if to build our union required the deliberate taking of life, either the life of a grower or his child, or the life of a farm worker or his child, then I choose not to see the union built. Mr. Barr, let me be painfully honest with you. You must understand these things. We advocate militant nonviolence as our means for social revolution and to achieve justice for our people, but we are not blind or deaf to the desperate and moody winds of human frustration, impatience and rage that blow among us. Gandhi himself admitted that if his only choice were cowardice or violence, he would choose violence. Men are not angels, and time and tide wait for no man. Precisely because of these powerful human emotions, we have tried to involve masses of people in their own struggle. Participation and selfdetermination remain the best experience of freedom, and free men instinctively prefer democratic change and even protect the rights guaranteed to seek it. Only the enslaved in despair have need of violent overthrow. This letter does not express all that is in my heart, Mr. Barr. But if it says nothing else it says that we do not hate you or rejoice to see your industry destroyed; we hate the agribusiness system that seeks to keep us enslaved, and we shall overcome and change it not by retaliation or bloodshed but by a determined nonviolent struggle carried on by those masses of farm workers who intend to be free and human. Sincerely yours, Cesar E. Chavez United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, A.F.L.-C.I.O. Delano, CA chapter 3 No Constitution for Us Class Racism and Cold War Unionism It is often forgotten to what extent women were the first labor-force of factory-based, industrial capitalism. . . . The maintenance of male prerogative, in the face of threats from women’s employment, was conscious and was organized. — Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (1994)1 No Constitution for us, who are neither citizens nor persons, but a freakish creation called “aliens.” — Louisa Moreno (1950)2 The image of Luisa Moreno, the Guatemalan-born labor organizer and founder of El Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Español [Congress of Spanish-Speaking People], author of “Caravans of Sorrow” (discussed in chapter 1), stands watch over the migrant City of Angels. Her portrait graces the world’s largest mural, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a massive cover for a flood-control channel in the San Fernando Valley.3 The visual narrative of the mural chronicles the long sweep 112 No Constitution for Us of California history, from the first emergence of animal life out of the sea in prehistoric times to the multiethnic spectacle of the 1984 Olympics. Artist Judith Baca placed Moreno between the picture of police brutality in the Zoot Suit Riots of 1942 and the arrival of Jewish refugees from Europe; she thus embodies wartime aspirations for an alternate racial and class order amid the abundance of the southwestern economy. For Baca, the migrant imaginary of the 1940s took female form in the life of Moreno, who countered anti-immigrant policies and class racism as a community organizer for CIO unions in Southern California. Moreno’s appearance in the mural precedes segments devoted to the “Forebears of Civil Rights,” reminding viewers of the broader span of struggle that defined contestations over race, rights, and territory in the region. Rather than provide an evolutionary narrative of this history, the mural highlights the conflicting migrations and encounters of the many peoples who built California. In its production — which involved some four hundred youths from Los Angeles barrios, between 1976 and 1983 — the mural project promoted cooperation and community formation. The history it tells is another matter. “Our people are the internal exiles,” Baca wrote of the work. She then explained how her artistic vision transformed displacement into an aesthetic where “change, both social and personal, is not only possible — it has to happen.”4 Luisa Moreno is an apt figure for such loss and transformation. She abandoned a girlhood of privilege in Guatemala to become an outspoken labor- and civil-rights activist in the United States, leaving behind her identity as Blanca Rosa Rodríguez López and the bourgeois constructs of feminine virtue and racial purity that her given name signified. Historian Vicki Ruiz interprets the political significance of Luisa Moreno’s choice of the surname “Moreno” [brown-skinned] over her given name “Blanca” [white female], marking the young organizer’s identification with the Latina/o laborers with whom she worked.5 Moreno’s reinvention of herself in transit to the United States embodies the migrant imaginary of her generation. Baca’s depiction of Moreno contrasts the sharp angles of her face with the waving banners of marchers behind, offering an image of female militancy long absent from accounts of Latina activism and, in particular, of Latina politics in the pre-civil-rights period. Ruiz describes Moreno as “una mujer sin fronteras” [a woman without borders], “the only transcontinental Latina union organizer,” whose activism took her to New York City 113 114 No Constitution for Us garment shops, cigar factories in Tampa, pecan-shelling plants in San Antonio, and the canneries of Southern California.6 Itinerancy was a tough trajectory for the single mother, one that included the task of finding care for her daughter, Mytyl, while she devoted herself to the CIO. Then and since, there have been few precedents for such commitment to the collective will of migrants, workers, and poor women of color. That Judith Baca granted Luis Moreno a privileged place in her monumental narrative indicates both the centrality of Latina migrants to the formation of California and their vulnerability to erasure. Within the mural, Moreno figures a feminized migrant imaginary all but absent from official history and collective memory. In 1950, ten years after her “Caravans of Sorrow” speech, Moreno was forcibly repatriated to her native Guatemala. She was one of many Latina/o activists expelled from laborand civil-rights campaigns during the Cold War. Moreno had long rejected the tenets of U.S. exceptionalism and liberal nationalism, having worked to expose racial discrimination and labor exploitation in the United States. But her removal also altered the terrain of oppositional politics and the pursuit of Latina/o civil rights. This chapter is an examination of the combustible forces within the gender and ethnic politics that preceded El Movimiento Chicano, the civil-rights movement of the late 1960s. The fragmentation and dispersal of the radical left by government and anticommunist forces during the 1950s both incited new forms of ethnic militancy in the coming decades and foreclosed on transnational projects of class and ethnic solidarity. At the center of these conflicts were Latina activists who transgressed the restrictive gender norms of the post – World War II period. As the United States and Mexico alike hardened their national boundaries in the name of security, the “alien” emerged once again as a figure of provocation and subversion. Migrant women, whether waging class or gender rebellion, sought to expand the terrain of leftist struggle and met with state repression and male hostilities. My account of Cold War iterations of civil rights thus begins with the scene of deportation, when the INS denied Luisa Moreno a place in the political mobilizations that were to transform the social landscape in which she had labored and struggled. Despite the new claims to ethnic solidarity that took shape in the postwar years, the emergent discourse of rights defined race and class as the public domain of politics but continued to No Constitution for Us subordinate gender to an apolitical, private realm of female service and endurance. The political autonomy and mobility of women emerged once more as a site of cultural conflict and political repression within both the movement for Latina/o civil rights and the nation as a whole. Just as Moreno and other lesser-known Latina activists were embattled in the defense of their communities, so too were a group of women in Grant County, New Mexico. Between 1950 and 1952 the Mine-Mill Union struck against Empire Zinc, a bold expression of class struggle made all the more remarkable because the strike was carried by the wives, sisters, and daughters of the male miners. The strike against Empire Zinc provides a paradigmatic example of the domestication of Chicana militancy in the labor struggle and in its memory. In 1954, a filmic portrait of the strike, Salt of the Earth, was released and immediately censored for its portrayal of Mexican American women as labor militants during the height of Cold War red-baiting. A decade later, during the Chicano Movement, the film mobilized audiences to feminist, union, and antiracist causes through the figure of Esperanza, its Mexican American protagonist. And yet the film’s very narrative of female empowerment eclipses a more complicated account of Mexican American women in the strike. This chapter reads the film as an expression of gender conflict over female autonomy within Chicana/o social movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The film’s gestures of incorporation of women into the domain of class and ethnic politics anticipated the gender codes of ethnic self-determination operative in the ethnic nationalist discourse that gave form to El Movimiento Chicano. Cold War Exile Throughout her career, Luisa Moreno articulated a concept of rights that contested the importance of national sovereignty over the mobility of laborers and migrants. Through her work for the Congreso in the lead-up to World War II, Moreno articulated the decade’s most radical position on migration, labor, and collective action. She rejected the discourse of scarcity and competition that blinded labor leaders to the needs of Mexican workers, while also indicting the dominant ideologies of “Americanization” that divided Mexican Americans from Latina/o migrants in the pursuit of 115 116 No Constitution for Us civil rights. Her 1940 address, “Non-citizen Americans in the South West,” as we have seen in chapter 1, marked a comprehensive assault on the limits of liberalism in the United States. It exposed the mass repatriations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a symptom of a broader crisis of freedom within racialized capitalism and the war against fascism.7 Moreno’s demand for the recognition of migrant rights went unfulfilled while the United States and Mexico colluded in the Bracero Program and used deportation as a mechanism of labor control and of political repression. Soon after the war ended, Moreno herself became the target of INS persecution, when the Joint Fact-Finding Committee of the California Legislature on Un-American Activities designated her a “dangerous alien.”8 Moreno’s activism had drawn the attention of the FBI since the 1930s, because her labor organizing linked her to known communist and Latin American radical groups. At her first hearing before Senator Jack Tenney and the Fact-Finding Committee, on September 10, 1940, she forced a confrontation with state authorities over her political allegiances to communists in the labor movement. When Moreno invoked her First Amendment rights, the committee deemed her a hostile witness, and Tenney warned he would send a report of the proceedings to the INS.9 Moreno had recently filed an application for citizenship, following her marriage to the San Diego labor leader Gray Bemis, a U.S. national. She refused to be intimidated. On September 30, 1948, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a warrant for Moreno’s arrest, citing her political affiliation with organizations committed to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. In early 1949, the INS began deportation proceedings against her. The FBI made her one final offer of protection: she could obtain citizenship by testifying against Harry Bridges, an Australian-born leader in the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). Moreno denied the request, refusing “to be a free woman with a mortgaged soul.”10 Moreno reported receiving violent threats against her safety while she pursued her appeal to the INS. Soon after, she was arrested and placed in detention at the Terminal Island Federal Prison of Los Angeles, where she was held for several days. Upon her release, she gave up her appeal. Rather than remain and be forced to incriminate friends and colleagues, Moreno chose voluntary departure over certain removal. She and her husband returned to her native Guatemala in November 1950 under warrant of deportation, on the charge that she had been a member of the Communist Party.11 They soon im- No Constitution for Us mersed themselves in the progressive politics of Jacobo Arbenz, the leftist Guatemalan leader, but had to flee for Mexico City in 1954, following the CIA-sponsored coup that toppled the government. Moreno lived in Cuba and Mexico before finally returning to Guatemala, where she died in 1992. Luisa Moreno understood her status in exile as a dimension of the fundamental condition of rightlessness that confronted racialized migrants and U.S. nationals alike: “We are right back in the pages of that revealing book on the ‘Asiatic and the Alien,’” she wrote shortly before her departure from the United States. “No Constitution for us, who are neither citizens nor persons, but a freakish creation called ‘aliens.’”12 Her deportation was punishment for defying the imperatives of nationalization, a challenge that proved decisive in the Cold War. Many prominent Latina/o labor leaders and civil-rights activists lacked full naturalization, which left them vulnerable to deportation in the 1950s. The rise of anticommunist hysteria led to the expulsions or exile of the Latina/o architects of the Popular Front. The CIO and immigrant-rights organizer Bert Corona argued that the purges of the U.S. labor movement left Latina/o organizers particularly vulnerable and isolated; deportation proceedings and intimidation led to the departures of “Josefina Fierro, Refugio Martínez, Humberto Silex, Armando Dávila, Frank Martínez, Tony Salgado, and Fred Chávez to name a few.”13 The U.S. left and union leadership privileged the cases of indicted Euroamerican leaders, Corona recalled, over the defense of Latina/o activists. Although several prominent lawyers, writers, and labor activists, notably Carey McWilliams, had formed the Provisional Committee for Luisa Moreno Bemis, the taint of communism was enough to seal her fate, and she joined the number of Latina/o militants forced into hiding, prison, or exile. It is worth considering what the anticommunist crusade cost Mexican American social movements in the decade preceding the full flower of the civil-rights movement. The forcible removal of migrant militants from the national scene — and, especially, from the leadership of community organizations and labor unions — had particular implications for Latina/o activism in the United States. The anticommunist repression of the 1950s did no less than remake the terrain of labor- and civil-rights struggle. State repression restricted the possible forms of dissent, restricting the possibilities for oppositional politics, as evidenced in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which curtailed the authority and activities of unions in the name of 117 118 No Constitution for Us national security and state interests. Just as antiunion legislation remade the relationship between the state and organized labor, Cold War policies also infringed on the internationalist vision that supported the most expansive claims to rights for Mexicans and Mexican Americans within the United States. Even as the United States continued the legal importation of Mexicans and Caribbean nationals for farm labor, new immigration legislation cemented the use of naturalization to reinforce political boundaries within the nation. The McCarran Act or Internal Security Act of 1950 required all communist organizations to register with the federal government and established the Subversive Activities Control Board for domestic surveillance of persons deemed a potential security threat. This board was able to deny the members of these groups the rights of citizenship. The INS also gained new powers to reverse the naturalization of those deemed enemies of the state. The McCarran Act was a cornerstone of alien exclusion and deportation laws during the Cold War, allowing the state to curtail protected rights in times of war or cases of “internal security emergency.” Throughout the 1950s, U.S. immigration policy continued to treat “aliens” as the greatest threat to domestic security. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 — which allowed the government to expel suspected subversives from the country and deny entry to those suspected of subversive intent — responded to the fear that migrants were carriers of communist ideology.14 With the end of the wartime economic expansion, Mexican Americans became targets of renewed hostilities and suspicion. One group, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB) was especially important in the defense of Mexican migrants’ rights.15 Its Los Angeles chapter, in operation between 1950 and 1954, brought together Jewish and Latina/o radicals who shared a pluralist vision for the incorporation of migrants into U.S. society. Rose Chernin, an émigré from Czarist Russia, chaired the Los Angeles Committee and oversaw legal defense, public education, and political organizing despite her known ties to the Communist Party. In order to counter the separations of families and the removals of long-term residents in the United States, the ACPFB organized petition drives and legal proceedings that drew attention to the plight of citizenchildren caught up in the deportation campaigns. The ACPFB estimated that as many as twenty-five to one hundred Mexican children, many of them U.S. citizens, were deported to Mexico daily from the Los Angeles No Constitution for Us County area. These children were the unanticipated casualties of INS policies to repatriate undocumented Mexicans under Operation Wetback. In the years between 1947 and 1954, David G. Gutiérrez writes, INS agents apprehended an average of five hundred thousand unauthorized migrants each year.16 In this climate, the use of deportation as a threat to collective action proved debilitating to the precarious transborder solidarity that had guided Latina/o organizers during the 1930s. Engendering Exile A close colleague of Luisa Moreno during the 1930s and 1940s, Bert Corona remembered her as “that rare human being for whom the human household is her family.”17 For Corona, not only did Moreno’s loyalties transgress the borders of the nation-state; they also transgressed the dominant vision of female service to family and community, since Moreno chose political solidarity over the primary bonds of kinship and ethnicity. Not only did Moreno abandon the confines of her Guatemalan family for the migratory circuit; she also divorced an abusive husband and led a public life that could not conform to period expectations of motherhood. In his remembrance, Corona reconciled Moreno’s militancy to cultural ideals of female virtue, but his very mention of the feminized domains of “household” and “family” also exposed how the mobility of the woman activist — her selfimposed exile from the domestic sphere — remained a source of anxiety for even her close colleagues. The expulsion of Moreno from the United States exacted a double punishment for her “subversive” politics: it suppressed not only her internationalist vision of antiracist class struggle but also her challenge to male prerogative in the political sphere. The 1950s removals prevented migrant activists from bringing their vision to the campaigns for social justice in the 1960s. One case among many is that of Josefina Fierro, who settled in Guaymas in the 1950s, leaving behind a remarkable career of activism in the Hollywood left and El Congreso. Fierro had played a decisive role in ending the Zoot Suit Riots of 1942, when she enlisted the support of State Department officials for the Los Angeles campaign against police brutality and racial terror. Not only did deportation curtail the expression of transborder solidarity and 119 120 No Constitution for Us migrant militancy; it also represented an evacuation of communal and national memory. The expulsions of activists were an object lesson on the primacy of state sovereignty over their exercise of civil liberties, and despite militant resistance to INS activity, Latina/o social movements gave far less prominence to the migrant imaginary in the following decade. But the suppression of Popular Front militants had another, less visible consequence. The repression that forced Emma Tenayuca into hiding in the 1940s and that led Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro to leave the United States in the 1950s had a disproportionate effect on women of color in the labor and socialist left. With the removal of these women from the spheres of collective action, migrant organizing lost the most visible figures of Latina militancy. This loss effectively made the resurgence of feminist activism during the 1960s appear new and unprecedented to Mexican American and migrant social movements; it also marked the erasure of a distinctly feminized migrant imaginary, in which the gendered framework of labor and community organizing was far less restrictive than collective memory may suggest. The absence of figures like Moreno, Fierro, and Tenayuca contributed to the gender conflicts that arose within Mexican American social movements in the late 1960s, when the imperatives of ethnic self-determination forced the subordination of women’s autonomy to the communitarian ideal of race as family. If, as feminist historians have shown, the 1950s remasculinized politics and made female domesticity a matter of national security, Cold War ideological shifts also threatened working-class women of color who had never inhabited that idealized feminine realm.18 The constructs of family and female domesticity held particular significance for migrant women and Chicanas, linked to the approximation of bourgeois citizenship but also to the private realm, which functioned as a front of struggle against class racism and state repression.19 Male dominance within El Movimiento Chicano (1966 – 1974) is well established within feminist scholarship and revisionist histories of the period. But what deserves greater notice is that the reemergence of patriarchal constructs of family and ethnic community within the movement coincided with U.S. legal restrictions on the movement’s migrant members. Women’s political autonomy and transnational solidarity came under threat in the Cold War when nationalist ideologies reconfigured the very scope of rights and liberation in El Movimiento. No Constitution for Us As Chicana/o historians have shown, women were active participants throughout the civil-rights movement; nonetheless, accounts of gender conflict over women’s politics and feminism remain within the controlling frame of a gendered ideology of separate spheres, public and private, that can participate in the erasure of a more complex gender and class history, with its transnational dimensions. In its common usage, domesticity signifies a gendered division of space and labor, where women are responsible for the family and the home. It can also delineate a territorial boundary between the interior space occupied by citizens and the exterior domain of the foreign. Cold War nationalism mobilized powerful ideologies of domesticity in both its senses, both to forestall gender conflict and to bring citizens into the task of nation-building and self-defense. The connection between domesticity and nationalism was no less pervasive within the rhetoric of the Chicana/o Movement and no less coercive with respect to gender. The Mine-Mill Union strike in Grant County, New Mexico, provides a case study of how the domestication of Latina activism within the labor left was also simultaneously a domestication of the transnational class struggle. Like the women of Doreen Massey’s study of Irish cotton industries, working-class Mexican and Mexican American women met with aggressive opposition to their autonomy and mobility in the postwar years, as labor- and civil-rights leaders sought to maintain male primacy in political organizing. The suppression of migrant and Mexican American women’s labor power and political militancy was conscious and it was organized. Cold War Unionism and Mexican Self-Defense Following a recession year for the metals industry in 1949, the price of zinc rose precipitously with the onset of the Korean War in June 1950. The wartime market put the New Jersey Zinc company at a decided advantage. With demand for domestic zinc only getting higher, the company’s subsidiary Empire Zinc, of Grant County, New Mexico, stalled negotiations with representatives of Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill). Empire Zinc charged that the union representatives brought unreasonable demands to the bargaining table in order 121 122 No Constitution for Us to provoke a strike.20 From mid-July forward, accusations of communist infiltration and manipulation dogged the union effort at the bargaining table. In a September 30 proposal, Empire employees offered their final list of demands: “collar to collar” pay (meaning wages for each hour spent underground), the resolution of grievances on company time and pay, a raise of five cents per hour, an end to speedups, and six paid holidays a year.21 The company flatly refused, and negotiations stalled. At the core of the wage conflict were pay differentials between white and Mexican American miners. Mexicans constituted roughly 95 percent of the Empire workforce and were concentrated in the dangerous and arduous underground jobs. The lower “Mexican wage” also extended to separate and inferior housing, washing, and leisure facilities and to payroll lines.22 Mexican Americans lacked indoor plumbing in their company housing, an issue that Empire Zinc refused to negotiate through the union. In his discussion of discriminatory practices in the southwestern mining industry, historian Zaragoza Vargas notes that although Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) investigators had called for public hearings on the mistreatment of Mexican American workers in mining and metal industries in 1942, federal authorities had refused. The government feared that airing charges of racism would threaten U.S. relations in Latin America and, in particular, the ongoing negotiations of the Bracero Program.23 When Local 890 entered into contract negotiations in June 1950, its parent union was in a precarious position within the larger labor movement. In February of that year, the CIO had dissolved its association with the Mine-Mill for its association with the U.S. Communist Party. MineMill had initially refused the Taft-Hartley requirement that all unions file noncommunist affidavits for their members; in the process, Mine-Mill lost its certification with the National Labor Relations Board. Although a later change in leadership led to a policy of compliance and gained the union its recertification, the Mine-Mill remained isolated and thwarted in its relations with employers, federal authorities, and organized labor alike. This gave New Jersey Zinc the upper hand as it approached the bargaining table. According to Local 890 lead organizer Clinton Jencks, Empire officials planned to starve out the weakened union in the hope of increasing the bargaining power of mining companies across the Southwest.24 Jencks was certain that Empire’s position reflected a clandestine accord among southwestern companies to destroy the leftist union. No Constitution for Us Despite the clear antagonism of both government authorities and the local community toward the strike effort, Bayard miners voted for a walkout in October 1950. But, as Jack Cargill writes, the dual wage structure carried over to the labor action, as “only twelve of the ninety-two unionists who struck Empire were Anglos.”25 These ethnic divisions came to the surface throughout Grant County, as hostilities increased between Mexican American supporters and local whites who opposed the strike. The strike continued for fifteen months and brought only modest gains for workers, but it became one of the most dramatic labor conflicts in the southwestern border region’s history. As Chicana/o historians have noted, the Mine-Mill Union earned the steadfast loyalty of its Mexican American adherents, despite its communist reputation. Although many of the miners of Bayard County were from longstanding Hispano families, native to New Mexico, their labor struggle encompassed a transborder vision of class solidarity with Mexican workers and migrants.26 During the 1930s and ’40s, Mine-Mill had represented the vanguard in antiracist unionism, leading the CIO in contesting the dual wage system and job discrimination across the Southwest. The MineMill newspaper, the Union, promoted the desegregation of the labor force by giving space to Mexican American unionists to speak for themselves. In 1951, writing under the banner headline “Es el tiempo para destruit [sic] la barrera” [It is time to break down the barrier], El Paso member José Fuentes invoked his wartime service as a rationale for ending the Mexican wage and racial divisions in the workforce: “Como va a ser posible que unos seres racionales, unos seres humanos, jovenes veteranos de la guerra estén contentos en ese ambiente?” [How will it be possible for rational beings, human beings, young veterans of the war, to be content in that environment?].27 Mine-Mill leadership cast the union’s commitment to Mexican American civil rights within a transnational framework of antiracist, anti-imperial labor activism. Mexican American unionists, both rank-and-file members and lead organizers, were the pivotal force in this effort. At the time of the Bayard strike, Mine-Mill unionists in Texas were engaged in crossborder organizing with the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM), in El Paso, while the national leadership pursued a North American accord among workers in the Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. metals industries. This internationalist strategy clashed with the official politics of 123 124 No Constitution for Us the Good Neighbor era and went against the grain of the nationalism of most U.S. unions. When Mine-Mill signed “a pact of friendship and mutual assistance” with the Mexican Miners Union in Mexico City, on May 18, 1950, it was Cipriano Montoya of Bayard Local 890 who presented a copper plaque pledging solidarity among the unions. “We move toward coordinated action of all metal miners of the Americas,” declared the U.S. delegates on behalf of Mine-Mill, “the dream of the hemisphere-wide labor solidarity.”28 Although the Canadian and U.S. delegation did not formally endorse all of the Mexican union’s provisions for achieving this hemispheric unity, the delegate reporting from the conference, Morris Wright, articulated his union’s position on the particular relationship of Mexican nationals to U.S. companies: “To the Mexican worker international solidarity means . . . something more. It means a step toward liberating his country from the semi-colonial status into which it has been pushed by the American owners of Mexican industry.” Wright compensated for the paternalism of his remarks with a gesture of masculine friendship: “It is good to clasp hands with workers from across the border — men who stand in the same relationship to the bosses as he does.”29 His homosocial expression of shared interests and common character glossed over the more difficult question of the very different relationship of Mexican and U.S. workers to their corporate bosses. During the trinational labor conference, Mine-Mill vice president Orville Larson used the forum to attack the U.S. Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America: “The growing cooperation between our unions . . . is of historic importance. It will lead to a new stage in the bargaining relations between our unions and the giant mining corporations that spread their grasping hands over all of North America.”30 The statement was a deliberate provocation of the capitalist interests that directed U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and that during the 1950s used U.S. diplomatic and military force to control labor in Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, and elsewhere. The Mine-Mill conference coincided with debates over the renewal of the Bracero Program: in 1951 the U.S. Congress extended the labor loan under Public Law 78. Although most of the rank and file of miners in New Mexico were not themselves migrants, they were well aware of the migrant chain that connected the two countries. Latina/o unionists associated with Mine-Mill organized across the border in order to unify the transborder labor mar- No Constitution for Us ket, but also in the service of anti-imperialism and labor insurrection. Their efforts drew INS harassment along with government surveillance. Federal authorities viewed the Mine-Mill-CTM alliance in the Southwest as evidence of a conspiracy to draw the CIO into an international communist plot. In his fascinating account of Mine-Mill organizing in El Paso, Zaragoza Vargas links the government’s anticommunist campaign against the union to the coordinated INS suppression of binational labor solidarities and Mexican opposition to racial discrimination in the United States.31 During the “little Red Scare” of 1939 – 41, cross-border labor activism led to conflicts among U.S. diplomatic officials, police, and Mexican consuls, when the local sheriff, Fox, arrested six organizers and brought the Un-American Activities Committee to investigate the alleged subversive presence in the border city. In an episode that anticipated the McCarthy hearings, Texas congressman Martin Dies brought investigative hearings against the Nicaraguan-born organizer Humberto Silex and the tejano Juan Peña in a show of force aimed at the laboring Latina/o class.32 That the incarcerated labor unionists reported having experienced physical mistreatment and civil-rights violations while in the sheriff ’s custody was of no account to the anticommunist crusade. While Fox triumphantly declared his victory over communist plans to have “Mexican aliens inject their form of government into this country,” the episode demonstrated the conflict between two contending projects for hemispheric unity: the probusiness Good Neighbor Policy and the CTM-CIO aspirations for classless unity among Mexican and Latin American peoples across the Mexico-U.S. border.33 Although such incidents of red-baiting cost the Mine-Mill opportunities for expanding membership and gaining exclusive union contracts, its Latina/o leaders developed successful organizing tactics that promoted ethnic ties and cultural preservation. At the onset of the Cold War, MineMill unionists joined other CIO militants to form the Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA), an organization dedicated to the concerns of Mexican Americans as a discriminated minority in the United States. The first ANMA conference took place in Phoenix in February 1949, and delegates went on to form chapters across the border states and as far north as Chicago. ANMA continued the work El Congreso had undertaken in the 1930s, adopting a platform for promoting civil rights in the areas of housing, education, employment, voting, women’s status, and immigration; 125 126 No Constitution for Us ANMA’s founders hoped their work would draw documented and undocumented migrants and Mexican Americans alike into a single movement. Historian Mario García describes ANMA as “a national organization for ethnic self-defense,” which derived its praxis from the radical tradition of transborder Mexican activism.34 The Latina/o left encompassed migrant and U.S.-born workers in its sweeping claims for a new order of civil and human rights in the borderlands. Like the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, ANMA invoked the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (the agreement signed by both governments at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848) to make the case for redress of Mexican poverty and marginalization in the United States. The two organizations collaborated in combating deportations of Latina/o migrants and sought the repeal of the McCarran and McCarran-Warren acts. In 1959, the ACPFB produced the pamphlet Our Badge of Infamy: A Petition to the United Nations on the Treatment of Mexican Immigrants, which looked beyond the domestic government to the United Nations for solutions to the discrimination and injustices that Mexicans suffered north of the border.35 Mine-Mill organizers dominated ANMA’s founding board, creating its platform for national civil-rights work on behalf of Mexican Americans, because, in their view, unionism was insufficient to the task of protecting the Mexican population in the United States.36 ANMA adopted an ideology of defense and reform based in part on the tenets of cultural nationalism, stressing ethnic and cultural ties to Mexico and promoting a discourse of kinship and common experience as a basis for national unity. The Mine-Mill Union reported with approval the prominence given to cultural education at the first national conference in Los Angeles. Noting that “significantly, the culture panel’s report excited the most interest,” the author opined, “Here were representatives of a people whose ancestors were physically conquered, but whose culture lived through the years, despite all the attempts to degrade, abuse, scorn, dilute, and distort it.”37 Mine-Mill members at the conference included several women staff members and organizers, including Aurora Casillas of Miami, Arizona, and Florence LaMarr and Bebé Grijalva, secretaries of Local 700 in Los Angeles.38 ANMA president Alfredo Montoya was the son of a Mexican worker at the Kennecott smelter in Hurley, New Mexico, the scene of major organizing efforts. Addressing the chilling effects of anticommunist policies at No Constitution for Us the forty-sixth Mine-Mill convention, Montoya defended the special relationship between Mexican Americans and the union: “Mexican-American people are not going to be deterred in our struggle for human dignity and the rights to which we are entitled. We will take an active part in saving unions like Mine-Mill from being destroyed.” Montoya noted that the convention marked the “first time an International union has given recognition to the Mexican-American people as a whole.”39 Both Mine-Mill and ANMA remained on the fringe of progressive organizations and unions, because their radicalism raised the threat of government retaliation. Nonetheless, both entities remained steadfast in their transnational labor activism and antiracist organizing. ANMA’s publications, El Progreso and La Voz, combined ethnic discourse with internationalist perspectives on labor rights and U.S. militarism. ANMA opposed Operation Wetback policies and militated against police brutality in the barrios. At a moment when more mainstream Mexican American organizations like the G.I. Forum viewed military service as a vehicle for overcoming second-class citizenship, ANMA declared its opposition to the Korean War and protested the disproportionate number of Latino casualties in the overseas conflict. ANMA countered the logic of Cold War militarism by naming war as a danger to development rather than adopting the prevailing view that U.S. aggression would bring global security and prosperity. Recognizing the centrality of the mining and metals industries to the war effort, ANMA supported the Bayard strike of 1950 – 52 and called for the end of hostilities in Korea.40 Government repression ultimately led to the demise of both Mine-Mill radicalism and the Mexican American civil-rights organization, which dissolved its national federation in 1954, following the costly legal defense of ANMA members called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s. Female Militancy and the Empire Zinc Strike People used to come and ask, “Who told you you could walk right there?” And we used to say, “We want to.” And they’d ask, “Who is your leader?” “Jane Doe.” “What is your name?” “Jane Doe.” Even the little girls 127 128 No Constitution for Us came with their mothers to the picket line, every time someone asked, “What’s your name?” — “Jane Doe.” . . . We are all leaders. — Mariana Rodríguez, captain of the Bayard picket line (1975)41 On October 17, 1950, Mine-Mill unionists set up two picket lines at entrances to the Empire Zinc plant in Bayard, New Mexico. Their contract had expired on September 30, with little promise of improved negotiations over wages, paid vacations, or housing conditions. Mine-Mill leaders anticipated a long strike and directed Local 890 to establish support committees to distribute benefits and weekly food rations to workers.42 For several months, the pickets continued uninterrupted as neither the company nor the union made a move to the bargaining table. Then, beginning in early 1951, company officials began a concerted campaign to break the strike, and they wrote workers urging them to circulate a “right to work” petition. That June, with a reported twenty-eight petitioners requesting to return to their jobs, Empire officials announced that the company would reopen the mine. The union had blockaded the primary access road, and picketers controlled traffic to and from the mine. Arguing that the highway was public, Empire management asked district attorney Thomas Foy to declare the mine-road picket illegal; Foy assented and ordered the highway cleared. But as the mine moved to open on June 11, the picket line grew. Picketers clashed with the police deputies, and a number of women were arrested along with other protesters. In retaliation, the company obtained a strike injunction from the New Mexico Sixth District Court, directing Mine-Mill Local 890 to terminate all pickets against Empire Zinc or face legal sanctions. Strike organizers called an immediate meeting, and on June 11, strikers and their family members assembled en masse in the union hall. After eight months on the line, most of the miners were unwilling to concede their defeat. To continue the pickets against the court order, however, would have incurred financial and legal liabilities that would have imperiled both the workers and their union. As deliberations went into the night, three community members came forward with a proposal to save the strike and still obey the injunction: the women of Bayard would hold the line.43 According to historian Ellen Baker, the proposal that Bayard women should take over the miner’s picket originated with Aurora Chávez, Virginia No Constitution for Us Chacón, and Virginia Jencks. They had come to the meeting prepared with a plan for maintaining the strike action without violating the terms of the court order.44 The three women were married to active organizers for Local 890: Augustín Chávez, Juan Chacón, and lead union organizer Clinton Jencks. In 1948, wives and other family members had formed the ladies auxiliary for Local 890 and earned certification as Auxiliary 209 in May 1949. Women had been visible participants in union activities throughout the local’s history; their charter dictated that members “enlist the aid of all miners’ families to further the principles of trade unionism, because they have a special interest in safety, health, compensation, political action, housing, education, and child welfare.”45 By the time of the injunction, women were members of strike committees, assisting with publicity and solidarity activities on behalf of the local. From the 1940s onward, these women had been active community organizers in Grant County; as Baker asserts, they were hardly new to political struggle.46 But because women were not actual members of the union, it was legal for them to conduct the pickets. Despite women’s record of participation in the local, though, the proposal met with considerable objections from the male members; they questioned the women’s capacity to withstand the dangers of the labor action and expressed concerns about how women would meet their childcare obligations while conducting the picket. Accounts of the meeting concur that the discussion broke down along gender lines. Only the paid Mine-Mill staff supported the women’s initiative.47 Nevertheless, because the international union permitted women to vote on the proposal, Local 890 endorsed the women’s strike action.48 The miners’ recalcitrance toward the women’s picket likely stemmed from the stark gender relations of production in the mining economy of Grant County. The social relations of southwestern mining rested on a strict segregation of gender roles, both in waged labor and unwaged domestic tasks. Empire Zinc employed few women and certainly none in mining occupations in 1950. Although wartime labor shortages had led women into Grant County mines, companies maintained strict segregation of the workforce and expelled the women at the war’s end.49 Management and unions both classed women as unskilled workers and as supplementary wage-earners to men. Mining has most often been a particularly masculine trade: tradition in many mining communities around the world forbids women to work underground. Mining superstition holds 129 130 No Constitution for Us that a female presence will cause cave-ins and disasters.50 Bayard miners accepted the women’s picket as an emergency measure, ceding women political ground with little recognition of their independent stake in the strike’s success. The auxiliary immediately elected strike captains and coordinated shifts for the pickets. On the following morning, June 12, hundreds of women and children from across Grant County set up a barrier against the replacement workers who intended to reopen the mine. The pickets became scenes of frequent violence, as police deputies sought to break through the women’s barricade and to reopen the mine road to company traffic. Within a few days, local officials brought arrest warrants against several women picketers, charging them with assault and battery as they held off scabs. Then on June 15, 1951, the situation escalated: county officers lobbed tear-gas grenades at the women and children on the highway picket. In the skirmish that followed, the police arrested fifty-three women and locked them up with their young children in the Grant County Jail.51 The group refused the sheriff ’s offer to release them on the condition that they return home and stay away from the pickets. Their disorderly conduct drew national press to the strike and later provided the most memorable scene of women’s resistance in the 1954 film Salt of the Earth. Strike coverage in the Mine-Mill newspaper, the Union, reflected the miners’ ambivalent attitudes toward the women’s takeover of the picket lines. Reportage alternated between celebrations of female heroism on the line and assertions of patriarchal authority over the new picketers. Two months into the women’s action, for example, the Union trumpeted female militancy, with news that three of the women picket leaders had been jailed for their defense of the strike: “There’s no question that the women of Bayard, Silver City, and other towns hereabouts have ‘won their spurs’ as far as Mine-Mill Local 890 is concerned.” In the same article, Cipriano Montoya, president of Local 890, applauded the nomination of three women — Elvira Molano, Catalina Barrelas, and Carmen Rivera — to the official bargaining committee for the Empire Zinc workers, stating that the women “have earned the right by two months of around-the-clock picketing at Empire Zinc; by standing up to arrests, jailings, gunmen, blackjacks, and tear gas.”52 The spectacle of jailed women and children reinforced the novelty of this picket line. Empire Zinc used the scene as proof of the communist manipu- No Constitution for Us lations of the local workforce, which officials claimed had led the desperate workers to abandon all decorum in the strike; and the union depicted these clashes as evidence of soulless corporate warfare against the workers’ families. When fourteen-year-old Rachel Juárez, the niece of a striking miner, was struck by a company-paid deputy’s car and dragged several hundred feet, the Union depicted her heroism as an act of filial duty, expressing both indignation at the routine assaults on women and children and applauding their stoicism before physical intimidation and injury.53 Juárez’s attacker defended his actions, stating that the girl had deliberately thrown herself onto the car and cursed him — a claim that would not excuse his actions but, if true, might account for why the young girl had sustained various serious injuries and been jailed twice in just two months.54 The Union accounts consistently omitted any mention of the women’s own militant aggression, which would have made the spectacle far less appealing to a broader audience. The violence with which picketers fought the scabs, jumped on their cars, and pelted the company officials with chile peppers remained entirely absent from the stories of Bayard’s “heroic women.” Sympathy for the women was crucial to the union cause; Democratic senator James Murray of Montana, then a member of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, wrote in protest to Mine-Mill president John Clark, “I have been greatly shocked by newspaper accounts of the jailing of pickets, including women and children.”55 Such concern rested on the notion that women and children were not themselves protagonists of the labor conflict but, rather, were the dependents of the absent male workers. But the same Union article that cited Murray’s paternal concern also quoted a defiant picketer saying, “The only way the company could get us off this line would be to drop an atom bomb.” These women clearly had no trouble speaking for themselves, so in the coverage of the strike, they had to be made the proper object of paternal sympathy, lest such expressions of boldness also lead to female insubordination in the union. In fact, the Union also neglected to mention the women’s prior history of labor activism. Articles listed picketers by their married names and affiliation to striking husbands or fathers and only very rarely quoted women directly. The July 16, 1951, issue, for example, placed the headline “Heroic Bayard Women Hold the Line” under an image of company-paid deputies tangling with picketers. Although Ramona Nañez appears to be wrestling 131 132 No Constitution for Us Bayard District-Wide Mine-Mill Union Strike [n.d.]. Photograph taken by Clinton Jencks. Jencks identified picketer Mary Pérez’s attacker as Deputy Sheriff Louis Rhea, “former Co. gunman now stationed at Hanover.” (Courtesy Los Mineros Photograph Collection, Chicana/o Research Collection, Arizona State University Libraries) with the deputy Porter, the caption states that her attacker “threw [her] to the ground a moment after this picture was snapped.”56 That description suggests that the editors were as concerned to downplay Nañez’s fighting posture as to denounce company tactics of intimidation. Although the article invoked the “brave women” in its opening sentence, it subordinated them to its story of the principal confrontation between male protagonists: “Every conceivable legal and extra-legal weapon was being used by the company and its stooges in local government in futile attempts to destroy the workers’ morale and force them back to work.”57 Within this account, the assaults on women constituted an injury to the male workers: the women functioned less as autonomous actors in the labor conflict than as proxies for the banned strikers: No Constitution for Us But the story of the Empire strike is the story of courage and the determination of working men and their families not to let a greedy corporation force down their already inadequate living standards. This strike is a fight for bread and butter. It is also in the best tradition of Mine-Mill.58 Such a model of familial struggle domesticated women’s activism by circumscribing it within the sanctioned domain of domestic duty and female service. Below the Union headline, the women disappeared, as their omission reinstated the prevailing division of labor and leadership within the union movement. Most important in the context of the Korean War, the article dignifies the women’s participation by making their struggle a matter of “bread and butter” and not of ideology. As the strike wore on, Cold War interdictions against radical unionism made the Mine-Mill Union far more vulnerable than Empire Zinc to public sanction. As Jack Cargill notes, the strikers’ sole strategy was to outlast the company in the labor standoff, while also working to prevent state officials from intervening against the workers’ blockade. Public sympathy was critical to this effort.59 By promoting the labor action as an act of familial solidarity against corporate greed, the union hoped to create allegiances between the largely ethnic Mexican miners and the broader population of Grant County. The racial division of the workforce made the task difficult, especially because the negative financial impact of the strike followed on the recession year of 1949, which had hurt the mining-dependent local economy. Maintaining an image of female propriety and the normative gender division of labor within the community became a paramount concern to Mine-Mill publicity. The spectacle of women outside the home was enough to incite anxiety about sexual transgression — miners had objected to the women’s picket on the grounds that their wives might fraternize too closely with other men. When the Union reported that the Silver City courts planned to prosecute Virginia Jencks for “touching David Gray” — the man who had beaten her and her daughter Linda on the picket line — the paper took pains to contest any suggestion of female deviance, by describing her as “the attractive Mrs. Jencks.”60 For Mexican women, who were the majority of picketers, however, the codes governing female conduct took a different form. Union reports tended to depict women of color in terms that banished their sexuality altogether. José Fuentes, writing for the Union about Mexican women’s 133 134 No Constitution for Us activism, first had to establish the legitimacy of women’s entrance into the public sphere: “They knew that the responsibility rested on them, — the responsibility that, because of technical questions of law, had been lifted from the shoulders of their husbands.”61 Fuentes made the women’s activism a matter of legal contingency and, therefore, of a temporary reversal of gender roles. By depicting the women’s motivation as one of maternal concern, Fuentes reinscribed their actions within the domestic front of ethnic struggle: “When they saw that the future of their homes hung in the balance, thinking only of the welfare of their children, nothing else mattered to them.”62 And, although his article celebrated the Mexican women’s fighting spirit, it effectively denied them an autonomous stake in the union conflict by making their expressions of political will a matter of devotion to family. Though the strike marked a serious challenge to the ethnic division of labor, it did not intend to threaten the gender roles of production and reproduction. The strike’s discourse of ethnic solidarity among Mexicans circumscribed female mobility by placing it under patriarchal surveillance: Among these women, there isn’t a single sad face. Nor is there a single face that shows lack of confidence in victory. Among them we saw no signs of fatigue. Nor is there any hypocrisy. The only thing that is seen there is fraternity, cooperation, and the open comradeship that characterizes us Mexicans.63 At first glance, the passage appears to celebrate the female valor with equanimity and solidarity, but its insistent repetition of the verb “to see” hints at a watchful gaze that polices the women’s actions on the line. Fuentes asserts that the women were fully competent in the struggle, but his depiction evacuates women’s agency by denying them the expression of any independent feeling (sadness, doubt, fatigue) that might threaten the “fraternity, cooperation, and open comradeship” of ethnic kinship. Mine-Mill unionists struck an uneasy balance between promoting women’s labor activism and containing their problematic militancy to the domestic front of struggle. At the onset of the Empire Zinc strike, the Union published a single-image comic strip depicting a miner’s wife discussing the labor conflict over the phone: the woman says, “She was telling me No Constitution for Us that my husband should leave Mine-Mill and go into steel, but she suddenly got a headache and went home.”64 The woman, dressed fashionably in a dress and pumps, stands chatting easily with a friend on the phone while clutching a broken vase in her hand. The joke is, of course, that the woman has just clubbed her impertinent visitor, but all the while she keeps up bourgeois appearances by gossiping about the harm that she has just inflicted as if it were a common feminine malady. The simple humor of the drawing captures the constraints on women’s expression during the Cold War, when the feminized home became in the popular imagination not only a space of refuge from politics but also another site of struggle. The comic assents to the fact that women did engage in the fights typically reserved for men, but it insists on the absurd notion that they did so only in the veiled conventions of bourgeois domesticity. The artist’s depiction of the Mine-Mill wife as a white woman in a middle-class home, enjoying the rituals of female gossip and visits (and the luxury of a phone!), when most of its members in Grant County lived in company-owned, substandard housing that often lacked indoor plumbing, suggests the power of bourgeois ideology even in the imaginary of the radical left. But the cartoon also conveys an awareness of female rage that could erupt from the boundaries of the domestic sphere. In its humor, the comic considered how to make that rage useful to the labor movement without disturbing male prerogative. In the end, the women’s picket lasted over seven months, but legal wrangling in the courts eventually sapped the energies and resources of the union. Negotiations stalled through the spring of 1951 as the district judge and justice of the peace consistently sided with Empire management in their rulings on the strike. Officials of the international union and Local 890 served jail sentences and paid steep fines, while numerous mediation efforts failed. Then, on August 23, hostile strikebreakers attempted a sudden end to the strike by driving their cars though the Empire picket lines.65 This violence brought the strike national press coverage, as the union called for an industry-wide walkout in support of Local 890. Despite their antagonism to Mine-Mill, even the AFL and CIO locals respected the walkout in Grant County, which lasted two weeks. As President Truman interceded, using provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act to set an emergency injunction against the miners’ strike, Grant 135 136 No Constitution for Us County became convulsed with waves of anticommunism, including vigilante organizing and business-sponsored petitions for martial law. In December, police moved to reopen the mining road and took charge of the pickets, forcing Local 890 to obey the injunction to clear the highway to mining traffic. When management and union representatives finally reached a contract settlement a month later, both sides made concessions in the labor agreement. Workers gained increases in hourly wages, a pension plan, and new programs for illness and accident insurance. The company remained intransigent on the question of collar-to-collar pay and the demand for indoor plumbing in Mexican American housing. The company ultimately emerged victorious as it added a stronger no-strike clause in the new contract and then continued its lawsuit against the union for damages incurred during the plant shutdown. But given the weakness of the labor position in negotiations, Local 890 accepted the contract as a union success. According to Jack Cargill, Clinton Jencks reckoned that the results were not a workers’ victory “on paper” but that “the recognition won by the women and the emergence of new leaders” could count as a triumph for the union.66 The strike took on new meaning in memory. In retrospect, the women’s picket offered a powerful example of female empowerment and ethnic unity. The storied reversal of gender roles — women holding off scabs and men washing clothes — became a vehicle for drawing feminist concerns into the domain of labor- and civil-rights struggles. Spectators saw ordinary women mobilize to bring their interests over housing, plumbing, and health to the fore as legitimate labor concerns in the class conflict. But despite this recognition, the prevailing narrative of the strike still managed to set clear limits on women’s autonomy in the movement. As Cargill demonstrates, women’s actual roles in the negotiating committees were quite limited, and they had no say in the final union settlement with the company. Mine-Mill’s annual convention following the strike yielded a resolution on women’s organizing that denied the auxiliary any role beyond service to an essentially male union: “Men cannot be wholehearted union members without the cooperation of their womenfolk. . . . our union needs their understanding, sympathy, and support.”67 By contrast, nearly a decade and a half earlier, El Congreso had issued a far more expansive statement on working women during its second convention in December 1939: No Constitution for Us Whereas: The Mexican woman, who for centuries had suffered oppression, has the responsibility for raising her children and for caring for the home, and even that of earning a livelihood of herself and her family, and since in this country, she suffers a double discrimination as a woman and as a Mexican. Be it Resolved: That the Congress carry out a program of . . . education of the Mexican woman, concerning home problems, . . . that it support and work for women’s equality so that she may receive equal wages, enjoy the same rights as men in social, economic, and civil liberties, and use her vote for the defense of the Mexican and Spanish American people, and of American democracy.68 Rather than present domestic duties as natural extensions of Mexican women’s gender identity, the 1939 resolution (whose authors included Josefina Fierro and Luisa Moreno) portrayed them as a burden and indicted the discriminated status of women within the Mexican community as well as without. Its authors demanded the full recognition of women’s equality, independent of their relationship to men. Whereas the Mine-Mill statement used marriage as a figure for ethnic and working-class unity, El Congreso exposed the gendered division of labor as another front of struggle. “A Crime to Fit the Punishment”: Making Salt of the Earth The determination of the Mine-Mill women, both in the face of the prevailing gender norms and the threat of violence, attracted considerable attention in progressive circles. Their story drew the attention of three Hollywood filmmakers, Paul Jarrico, Michael Wilson and Herbert Biberman, who were already embattled in their own struggle against anticommunist repression. The three associates of the Hollywood Ten chose to retell the story of the Empire Zinc strike “as a crime to fit the punishment” that the anticommunist proceedings had inflicted on their careers.69 Film director Herbert Biberman had served six months in a federal prison for his refusal to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). 137 138 No Constitution for Us Jarrico and Wilson had also defied hearings. In 1951, Jarrico and Biberman had joined with other banned artists to establish the Independent Productions Corporation (IPC), a film company devoted to the aesthetics of socialist realism and stories of popular struggle. Later that year, Paul Jarrico vacationed at a ranch near Taos, New Mexico, where he and his wife, Sylvia, met Clinton and Virginia Jencks, who were organizing for Local 890. Clinton Jencks seized the opportunity to invite the Jarricos to Bayard to assess the potential of the Mine-Mill cause for a film. Once Sylvia Jarrico marched in the ongoing picket, the two became convinced of the dramatic values of the miners’ struggle. Paul Jarrico saw an analogy between his own conflicts in Hollywood and the Mine-Mill’s expulsion from the CIO for its tolerance of communist membership. He promised the Jenckses that the IPC would return to make a film in a historic collaboration with the mining community; it would be, in his words, an account of “the dignity of women, labor, and a racial minority” struggling for economic justice and democratic rights.70 Back in Los Angeles, Jarrico persuaded Biberman of the value of the project. The two enlisted Michael Wilson, the author of the screenplay for A Place in the Sun, to write for the film. The filmmakers wanted the film to spark a revival of progressive filmmaking, one engaged with social justice in opposition to Cold War policies. Filming began in January 1953, in a production process that involved the depicted community at a level unprecedented for a Hollywood film. The artists asked the townspeople to play themselves in the film, both out of a sense of reciprocity with their subjects and because of budget shortfalls for the production. Professional actors were hesitant about working with blacklisted filmmakers, and Hollywood unions withheld production crews from the film because of its political status. The improvised crew became the most integrated major film set of its time, employing African American and Latino tradesmen who ordinarily suffered a blacklist of another sort. The production process became a social movement in itself, breaking racial codes entrenched in mainstream cinema. Bayard residents pushed Jarrico and Biberman to cast a striker in the central role of the film. Ramón Quintero, the male lead, was modeled directly on the Mine-Mill organizer Juan Chacón, who was given the chance to play himself. The directors did not choose a local woman for the leading female role, however. Instead, No Constitution for Us they brought in Rosaura Revueltas, a noted Mexican actress who spoke fluent English, to play the part of Ramón’s wife, Esperanza. Throughout the production, community members educated the filmmakers in the realities of Mexican American life in the segregated county and exerted considerable pressure to obtain the filmic representation they desired. Wilson spent a month in Bayard, conducting interviews and gathering material for the script. He conceived of structuring the narrative around a Mexican American miner and his wife, whose marital relationship would reflect the social transformations unleashed in the strike. Wilson vetted the script among some four hundred members of the mining community, who rejected various elements of the plot as inauthentic or demeaning to them as Mexican Americans. Although they accepted the central marriage plot, community members rejected scenes of the husband’s infidelity or drunkenness, arguing that such stereotypical images would detract from the dignity of their struggle. Members of Local 890 also rejected an initial plot that would have given the white union organizer Clinton Jencks primacy in the organizing effort and insisted that the grassroots leadership receive equal time onscreen.71 Well before the film’s completion, Salt of the Earth attracted national attention for its defiance of the Hollywood censors. These “Reds in the Desert” sparked media attacks, with syndicated labor columnist Victor Reisel sounding the alarm, “not too far from the Los Alamos proving ground . . . [w]here you try to hide secret weapons . . . you find concentrations of Communists.”72 Entertainment-industry unions and studio executives closed ranks against the film — canceling insurance policies for the production crew, refusing contracts for processing or projecting the film, and mobilizing government officials against the filmmakers. On February 25, 1953, midway through filming, the Immigration and Naturalization Service seized Revueltas’s passport. Claiming to find fault with the seals on her documents, agents drove the actress to El Paso, where they questioned her under armed guard. Revueltas returned to Mexico City under order of “voluntary” departure in circumstances similar to Luisa Moreno’s deportation just three years earlier. The filmmakers resorted to creative editing as they continued production without her. Back in Grant County, on March 3, vigilantes fired on Jencks’s car and led a mob onto the set, where they fought crew members and damaged camera equipment. The El Paso 139 140 No Constitution for Us Herald-Post praised the attackers “in their determination to clear away the pink overcast from their beautiful country.”73 Despite the setbacks, Salt of the Earth finally opened on March 9, 1954, at private movie houses in New York and Los Angeles. The filmmakers had edited the footage in a secret cutting room and booked screenings without support from major motion-picture distributors. At its premiere, projectionists refused to run the film because of pressure from their union. As a result, the film enjoyed a run that proved all too brief. The drive-in theater near Silver City sold out for three weeks after the film’s release, as the mining communities came out to see themselves onscreen. In Mexico City, La Sal de la Tierra earned laurels for Revueltas and incited popular sympathies for the unionists and the blacklisted artists. But the film did not survive the assault from the conservative film industry. Ultimately a coalition of Hollywood moguls, projectionist unions, and conservative organizations like the American Legionnaires succeeded in banning the further distribution of the film. In September, the film had one last theatrical booking in Menlo Park, California; screenings had been limited to one theater in Los Angeles, seven in Northern California, two in New York, one in Silver City, and two others in the Southwest. Despite the long years of censorship that followed, Salt of the Earth reemerged following the civil-rights movements of the late 1960s. In 1975, Sonja Dahl Biberman, who had been an associate producer on the film, obtained a special screening at an international women’s cinema festival.74 Salt of the Earth toured internationally in film festivals, union halls, and college campuses. Activists hailed the film as a resonant account of popular opposition to corporate greed and a moving depiction of women’s collective action. That Esperanza, the film’s central protagonist, was a poor, Mexican American woman made the film all the more significant as a chronicle of the culture of resistance that opposed the Cold War consensus. Audiences appreciated that the story the filmmakers and their interlocutors in Bayard chose to tell offered a vital prehistory of the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s. The character of Esperanza embodied all the contradictions confronting Mexican Americans, especially women, as they struggled toward the national mobilization against racial segregation that became the civil-rights movement. In its story of a marriage and a strike, the film plotted the linked spheres of Mexican American women’s struggles for full rights and political autonomy. No Constitution for Us The Marriage Plot Esperanza’s voice : We did not know what we had won in the strike. But our hearts were full. And when Ramón said . . . Ramón (simply): Thanks . . . sisters . . . and brothers. — Michael Wilson, “Salt of the Earth: Screenplay”75 From the beginning, then, the film announces Esperanza’s importance: she is the symbolic device that supports the didactic function of the strike narrative, elevating the local story to political allegory. The multiracial, working-class women’s mobilization commemorated in Salt of the Earth is an example of what critic Jean Franco has termed “the tradition of women’s movements in Latin America,” in which feminist concerns find expression in relation to “other social and political issues.” For these movements, she writes, women’s activism “is not only a question of individual liberation but of social justice and democratization.”76 Esperanza fights for a voice in the strike only to speak for the concerns of the collective, not for herself. Salt of the Earth frames the women’s takeover of the Empire Zinc picket line through the story of marital discord between the timid Esperanza and her overbearing husband, Ramón Quintero. As the miners organize the strike effort, their wives gather to dispute the omission of their concerns about sanitation conditions and plumbing from the men’s list of demands on the company. When Esperanza acknowledges that Ramón has dropped their interests from the issues slated for arbitration, her companions suggest that the wives picket the negotiations, so “both sides will see we mean business”: Teresa: Come on Esperanza — how about it? We got to. Esperanza: No. No. I can’t. If Ramón ever found me on a picket line . . . Consuelo: He’d what? Beat you? Esperanza: No. No. (17) Esperanza’s subjection to spousal control dramatizes debates over the “woman question” — the relation of gender subordination to the capitalist division of labor, which continued to vex union movements and communists during the 1950s. That the film frames Esperanza’s story in relation to the threat of retaliatory violence from her husband means that even as she 141 142 No Constitution for Us enacts her gender rebellion, her activism remains circumscribed as service to the broader familia, the ethnic community. Esperanza’s evolution as an independent actor dramatizes how women forced unions to expand the sphere of class conflict. In Salt of the Earth, the strike moves from a conventional labor dispute to a communal effort at checking corporate dominance and the racial and gender divisions that limit working-class unity. The film recounts the women’s entry into the strike as an awakening of women’s political potential, as they bring their anarchic energies to the men’s labor conflict. Rather than making the discovery of women’s agency, however, the film enacts the containment of women’s power to the domestic sphere, even as it celebrates the women’s new recognition as a political force. That is, the focus of the film’s plot — marriage — forces a premature resolution of gender conflict by insisting on the complementary partnership between male and female spheres in the communal struggle. The marriage of Ramón and Esperanza naturalizes a gendered division of labor into distinct, cooperative fronts of collective unity against capitalist domination and racial subordination. By omitting the longer history of Mexican women’s militancy in favor of a developmental narrative of Esperanza’s coming to consciousness, the film suppresses the living conflict over gender and labor roles. Instead, the film offers a more colorful, folkloric drama of Mexican American machismo. Although the story highlights women’s efforts to prove themselves as militants, it continually subsumes those efforts within their status as wives. After the women lobby for their inclusion in the strike, the following scene narrates the men’s negative reactions by cutting from one couple to another, in four vignettes in which each husband chides his wife for her initiative: Sal : Why didn’t you check with me? It’s embarrassing! Charley : But Teresa, you can’t push things too fast. (26) Only the Anglo organizer Frank Barnes gets an angry response from his wife. The three Mexican women say nothing. Thus, even as the film demonstrates the contradiction between the union demands and the women’s disenfranchisement, it asserts the primacy of the marriage contract as the racialized domain of female struggle. In order to achieve a voice in public, the women must remake their men in private. No Constitution for Us The film’s depiction of “Mrs. Salazar” provides another lens on how gender ideologies figured in the construction of women’s political agency. In her narration of the early days of the strike, Esperanza notes the “unwritten rule” forbidding the women from joining the picket line. Only one woman breaks ranks, bringing her knitting to the scene of the men’s protest: Esperanza’s voice: But then one morning Mrs. Salazar went to the picket line. Her husband had been killed in a strike many years before . . . and she wanted to be there. Nobody remembers just how it happened, but one day Mrs. Salazar started marching with them . . . and she kept marching with them. After a while some of the women began to bring coffee to their husbands . . . and maybe a couple of tacos — because a man gets tired and hungry on picket duty. . . . It was about that time the union decided maybe they’d better set up a Ladies Auxiliary after all. (28 – 29) Mrs. Salazar can transgress the gender codes because as a widow, she is outside the surveillance or protection of a male partner. She takes the place of her absent husband beside the other men. Her presence on the line allows the other women to follow, although their actions are limited to supporting their husbands. Local 890 finally accepts the women into the union by forming the Ladies Auxiliary Committee, which commutes the women’s bid for a participatory role in the decision-making process to one of serving the miners’ material needs. Decisions about casting for the film suggest another dimension to the gender frame delimiting the women’s story. The filmmakers modeled the character of the widow on the activism of Elvira Molano, a leader in the women’s committee and a strike negotiator, who had been married to an Empire Zinc miner. Molano served as the co-chair of the union negotiating committee, a fact that drops out entirely from the film’s narrative of women’s empowerment. All told, three of the five representatives to the negotiating team were women from the picket line. Molano was even named “the most arrested woman” during the Empire Zinc strike.77 But these were not the stories that Salt of the Earth told. To play the widow Salazar, Molano appears onscreen dressed as an older woman, cloaking her gender rebellion in a long coat and headscarf. With these choices, the film unconsciously adopted the U.S. government’s attitude toward the 143 144 No Constitution for Us women picketers: their takeover of the strike was only possible because the U.S. law was unable to conceive of Mexican American women as political subjects. It is only because the court injunction did not address them that they were able to assume responsibility for the strike. This element of surprise at women’s collective power also pervades the film and serves as a device for reducing the threat of female militancy onscreen. The film portrays the Bayard women as newcomers to the union movement — theirs is a spontaneous show of resistance, rather than a product of the calculated, experienced planning that drew women like Elvira Molano, Henrietta Williams, Angela Sánchez, and Clorinda Alderette into the strike well before they reprised their historic roles in the film. Feliciana Montoya, for example, had been active in Communist Party circles during World War II and continued her political work after the Empire strike, until her murder in 1961. Mariana Ramírez, captain of the women’s picket line, had extensive personal experience with the humiliations of the “Mexican wage”: I was working with an Anglo lady. . . . we were doing the same thing. She was an Anglo, and she was getting fourteen dollars a week and I was getting seven. Sometimes we would work until nine o’clock, and the manager used to go out and get some sandwiches for the secretary, who was an Anglo, and the others, who were Anglos, and not a thing for me. When I got home I was hungry but I didn’t feel like eating. Not because I was tired, but because I was hurt, from the very bottom of my heart I was hurt.78 But the hungers that women brought to the picket line — as wage earners, as leftist adherents, as discriminated citizens — disappear within the film’s conventions of female domesticity. Salt of the Earth repeats the Mine-Mill rhetoric of feminine devotion to family to explain the women’s participation in the labor conflict. As if to reinforce this image, the sisters of Local 890 discarded the modern clothes they wore on the picket in favor of more chaste dresses and shawls for the film. Numerous snapshots taken on the women’s picket line center on the figure of a young woman dressed in a man’s work shirt, denim pants, and boots, adopting a posture of defiance before the camera.79 Her challenge to gender norms could not find No Constitution for Us accommodation within the marriage plot structuring the film, not only because of its connotation of sexual difference but also because it disrupted the public/private split that identified women’s political interests with the domestic sphere. If the youthful defiance recorded in picket photographs hints at the gender rebellion that animated the strike, then the somber figure of Esperanza functions as their resolution in the film. She is less the “composite” of the women of Grant County than the archetype of feminine self-sacrifice, an abstraction from the politically engaged miners’ wives who helped negotiate the strike settlement. As Esperanza begins to exert greater autonomy from Ramón, the film invests her newfound independence with the transcendent authority of the maternal. When Esperanza finally comes to the picket line with the other women, she is in the advanced stages of her pregnancy. Ramón, the picket captain, stands on the lookout for nonunion workers breaking through the line. Discovering that one strikebreaker is his old acquaintance, Sebastián Prieto, Ramón berates him for his betrayal, unaware that in his rage he has fallen into a trap set for him by the company bosses. As the sheriff and his deputies handcuff him and lead him away to a car for questioning, Esperanza suddenly feels the first pangs of labor pains. The film then cuts between scenes of Esperanza calling for assistance and Ramón’s exchange with the deputies as he realizes their intentions. The intercutting of the two scenes becomes more rapid, as Ramón yells in pain from the deputies’ blows and as Esperanza cries from the contractions. The camera zooms into extreme closeups of Ramón’s and Esperanza’s faces, as the two call out to each other: Ramón : Oh, my God . . . Esperanza . . . Esperanza . . . Esperanza: Ramón . . . Close up: Ramón. Now the two images merge, and undulate, and blur, as with receding consciousness. And then darkness on the screen. We hear the feeble wail of a newborn infant. (40) The purpose of the scene is to suture the two fronts of struggle, public and private, through the bonds of marriage. Esperanza’s wail merges these discordant figures. As gender violence threatens the struggle, the film secures women’s 145 146 No Constitution for Us alliance to the cause by depicting Ramón’s and Esperanza’s suffering as equivalent, and thus complementary. They are both punished by the company for the strike: Ramón is beaten by the local corrupted police, and Esperanza undergoes childbirth without the attentions of the company doctor. Esperanza begs forgiveness for wishing that the child would never be born, in effect denying that her gender subordination would render her experience incommensurate with Ramón’s. The newborn represents the productive union of male and female partners against domination, a union that is achieved by sublimating their conflict. The marriage plot sustains itself through rigid adherence to an ideology of separate spheres, just as its gender logic is inscribed in Ramón’s and Esperanza’s distinct forms of bodily suffering. In the subsequent baptism scene, the baby stands in for the broader ethnic collectivity, as the desired object of the marriage plot. The two are reconciled in their hopes for their son: Ramón : A fighter, huh? Esperanza: He was born fighting. And born hungry. Ramón : Drink up Juanito, you’ll never have it so good. Esperanza: He’ll have it good. Some day. (44) Esperanza voices her emerging political militancy in the language of motherho...
Purchase answer to see full attachment