On Strike and on Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America - Hardcover

Baker, Ellen R.

3.67

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780807830833: On Strike and on Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807830836 ISBN 13: 9780807830833

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In 1950, Mexican American miners went on strike for fair working conditions in Hanover, New Mexico. When an injunction prohibited miners from picketing, their wives took over the picket lines--an unprecedented act that disrupted mining families but ultimately ensured the strikers' victory in 1952. In On Strike and on Film, Ellen Baker examines the building of a leftist union that linked class justice to ethnic equality. She shows how women's participation in union activities paved the way for their taking over the picket lines and thereby forcing their husbands, and the union, to face troubling questions about gender equality.

Baker also explores the collaboration between mining families and blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers that resulted in the controversial 1954 film Salt of the Earth. She shows how this worker-artist alliance gave the mining families a unique chance to clarify the meanings of the strike in their own lives and allowed the filmmakers to create a progressive alternative to Hollywood productions. An inspiring story of working-class solidarity, Mexican American dignity, and women's liberation, Salt of the Earth was itself blacklisted by powerful anticommunists, yet the movie has endured as a vital contribution to American cinema.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Book Description:

"The book reflects [Baker's] research into published sources, but she also interviewed a number of the key participants and used numerous archives, government records, and unpublished materials."-- The Journal of American History

About the Author:

Ellen R. Baker is associate professor of history at Columbia University.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.