Salt of the Earth Film Review
Your boss and landlord would hate this movie!
Salt of the Earth is a deeply engrossing film about gender roles and the exploitation of the American worker. Made in the 1950’s by a film crew who was blacklisted from Hollywood during McCarthyism(Red Scare), Salt of the Earth centers on the labor struggles of Latino miners in New Mexico during that time. A majority of the cast, including the male lead (Juan Chacón as Ramón Quintero), is portrayed by local residents and mine workers of New Mexico, and the realities of their experiences and emotions shine through in every scene.
The film opens with Rosaura Revueltas as Esperanza Quintero, the female lead, narrating. Esperanza is exhausted by the lack of running water and sanitary conditions in the company mining town that her and her community live in as family members to the mine workers. Esperanza and the other women in the town have to chop firewood constantly to heat water for laundry, dishes, bathing, and cooking. Esperanza brings this up as an urgent need to her husband, asking why it can’t be a union demand. Ramón brushes this off at first, feeling that other needs are more important right now, such as the safety conditions in the mines.
A near fatal accident makes the men decide to strike. Throughout the strike, the wives of many of the mine workers point out that how they are treated in the home is similar to how the bosses treat the workers. The women fight for a place in the union hall and to support the men on the picket line, but it’s not until the tables turn and the women end up having to strike on behalf of their husbands that the men truly see what some of them have been saying.
Throughout the film, all the strikers, women and men, have to deal with police brutality, attempts at division from the mine bosses, and scabs trying to cross the picket line and undermine them. The strike is long and exhausting, and throughout it, Esperanza and Ramón struggle both politically and personally to find unity with each other. In the end, both the miners and the couple are victorious.
For an American film, Salt of the Earth is ahead of its time. It is ahead in theme, ahead in having a majority Latino/a cast – all but five of whom are non-professional actors, and ahead in that a woman’s voice is predominant throughout. It is ahead of our time too, in that it focuses on the real struggles of working people. It’s free to watch on many platforms and we highly recommend it.