Fearless Speech and the Discourse of Civility in Salt of the Earth

The film Salt of the Earth depicts what Alicia Schmidt Camacho calls the “prehistory” of the Chicana/o Movement, and it casts both longstanding and contemporary conversations about civility in a fuller light. To date, scholarship on the film has focused on how its main character, Esperanza Quintero, develops her voice over the course of the film. We argue that a reading of the film’s material aspects—what, specifically, happens to the brown bodies in the film—renders a more complicated understanding of Esperanza’s speech and reveals that the discourse of civility often is a prelude to physical violence. In the ways the film’s characters resist the boundaries of civility and articulate alternatives to those boundaries, we find a familiar echo of the struggles in our own times.