Cold War Re-Visions: Representation and Resistance in the Unseen Salt of the Earth

Salt of the Earth is often considered one of the primary counter-narratives of the cold war. Banned in the U.S., the film was written and directed by blacklisted artists, chronicling a Mexican-American union -- also blacklisted from the CIO -- and their fight to end racism in the New Mexico mines, and sexism within their union. Yet for all the effort of federal, local and state government, Hollywood, and conservative labor unions to crush the film for its subversive content, it nonetheless underwent dramatic revision from its pre-production draft to its final filming that actually removed some of the more overtly political material. Looking at the unreleased pre-production draft, the article argues that the changes reveal a new film, one in which a powerful critique of anti-communism, imperialism, and the Korean War figure as central points of the original narrative.

Bringing the excised scenes to light, the article complicates the narrative offered by the filmmakers and later critics, that worker-artist collaboration was merely an act of correction on the part of the mineworkers to correct unflattering stereotypes of Mexican-Americans. Rather, the story of Salt of the Earth is a complex negotiation between the needs and desires of two disempowered groups – the blacklisted Hollywood left and a Mexican-American union with a long history of fighting for equality. The final decision to remove critiques of anti-communism, references to the Korean War, and the larger frame of the cold war leaves a film that focuses more tightly on anti-racism, but loses the connection between racism in the U.S. and imperialism abroad. While both the mineworkers' union and the filmmakers were part of 1930s and 40's "popular front" culture and shared many of the same political concerns, the cold war and its subsequent state repression had different effects and were part of different histories for the two communities. The greater threat of violence and persecution faced by the mineworkers, as well as the need to control their representation on the national stage, likely informed their decision to limit the nature of the critique made by film. Examining the original script and the changes can thus tell us much about how different communities within the field of the "old left" responded to the cold war and chose to represent their struggle on film, as well as the way in resistance is always situated within the multiply intersecting meanings of race and power.