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Scene 1. The stage shows the women on the picket line and the men at the clothes line. Anxious to end the strike quickly, the Sheriff's men attack and beat the women. The women hold fast, so the Sheriff attempts to weaken them by arresting their leaders (who have been identified by the informer Salvador), along with Esperanza, Estela and the baby, and taking them to jail.
Scene 2. In jail, the women keep up a constant din, demanding their due and lifting their spirits. Ramón arrives to fetch Estela and the baby while the Sheriff frets over how he will pay the bills for keeping the strikers incarcerated.
Scene 3. Esperanza and the women, released from jail, hold an organizing meeting in their home. Ramón, displaced, is outraged.
Scene 4. At the cantina, the men are discouraged by their helplessness and displacement by the women. Vicente, Ramón's compadre, urges them to look at "the bigger picture," and, hungry and angry, they decide to hunt for food for their starving families.
Scene 5. Esperanza and Ramón argue about their troubled marriage and she pleads for a relationship based on dignity and equality. Threatened and disgusted by Ramón's violent behavior, Esperanza decides to sleep alone, believing Ramón cannot accept that "somos iguales" ("we are equal").
Scene 6. While hunting, with time to ponder Esperanza's challenge, Ramón begins to see that "something she said rings in my ears...something she said is true." The men return to find the Sheriff attempting to evict the families of Zinctown, beginning with the Quintero family. As the Quinteros' furniture is removed and set down outside, the women return it through the back door. At last, defiant and united, the men and women confront the Sheriff and force a truce, for the moment. Ramón, holding a new understanding of his "place" and his "dignity," sees that neither can exist in a bigoted world without first creating respect and equality in his own home. With wife and husband reconciled, the strikers victorious, and the image of a better world at least momentarily in view, the people sing: "Share your riches with us, land of our birth, With the children of the sun, the salt of the earth."
Act 1 | Act 2
