Palomino: Clinton Jencks and Mexican-American Unionism in the American Southwest by James J. Lorence (review)

This biography of labor activist and scholar Clinton Jencks is an important addition to the work of James J. Lorence, an eminent historian of labor in the Southwest. Published posthumously, the volume is not so much a capstone to Lorence’s career as it is further evidence of the critical perspective—and the deep and abiding love—Lorence brought to the study of labor history in in the Southwest. In telling Jencks’s life story, Lorence reveals how the often-overlooked efforts of leftist activists in the region not only survived the reactionary years after World War II but managed to bring a mix of radicalism and pragmatic organizing to the labor movement, the Mexican American civil rights struggle, and even the otherwise conservative world of academic economists in the Southwest.

Lorence describes Jencks as someone rooted in early life in a moral indictment of inequality through his exposure to the history of the radical Western Federation of Miners and a sense of “Christian duty” (4). Jencks came to a leftist critique of the status quo in college in Boulder, Colorado, going further than most college students by committing himself to the cause of equality across race, class, and gender. Throughout the book, Lorence emphasizes the hybrid and independent nature of Jencks’s politics. A “Christian Communist” (xviii), Jencks worked to empower rank and file workers—and their families—and to argue for the expansion of the benefits of the American welfare state to the otherwise excluded. Lorence’s biography helps explain how, in the context of anticommunist repression after World War II, a pragmatic Christian moralist like Jencks could be radicalized and become a key organizer in a kind of underground world of the Southwest’s interracial left.

Clinton Jencks and his wife Virginia Derr Jencks were instrumental in the organization of Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in New Mexico, and in the landmark 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company. The struggle has been immortalized in the 1954 film, Salt of the Earth, produced in a collaborative effort between blacklisted Hollywood film makers, the miners themselves, and Clinton and Virginia Jencks. Lorence provides important contextual background regarding how Jencks came to earn the miners’ trust—the miners dubbed Jencks the “Palomino,” a title of deep respect—and how (like the characters in the film) Jencks overcame his paternalistic attitudes toward women despite himself. For those familiar with Salt of the Earth and Lorence’s Suppression of Salt of the Earth (1999), this biography adds greater depth of insight into what it meant to combine pragmatic organizing and radical ideology in social movements in the Southwest after World War II.

Jencks’s life story raises important questions about the tensions between individual leadership and collective action, the tensions between traditional gender values and the impulse to empower women as leaders, and the difficulties of building a multiracial community. Lorence’s colleague Harlan Grinde has done us all a favor in bringing this biography to light after his friend’s death. Yet the reader cannot help but feel that the manuscript could have used one more deep revision by Lorence himself. As it is, the narrative tends to be repetitive and not as subtle as it might be. Moreover, though Jencks was skeptical regarding the value of individual biographies, Lorence remained committed to this project as an example of an activist who continually reinvented himself to persist in the work for a communal vision of social justice. The reader cannot quite escape the feeling that Jencks was right that the book would have been stronger if framed as a collective biography. Still, Jencks’s biography will speak to anyone interested in the dilemmas of a radical life, the struggles of married couples to live out egalitarian principles, and the history of labor and civil rights activism and the repression of the New Left in...