Historical Notes for Esperanza
by Professors Ellen Baker and Linda Gordon
"Zinctown" is a fictional place and Esperanza was not our heroine's real name, but everything else in this opera is true. Zinctown is a composite of several mining towns around Silver City in southwestern New Mexico, a mountainous region rich in gold, silver, copper, and zinc. This was once Apache land, hospitable to neither Mexican nor Anglo, but the U.S. Army defeated the Apaches in 1886 and drove them to reservations elsewhere. Thus was the area opened for intensive mining by energetic prospectors and small companies.
By World War I the precious metals were mostly gone, and profitably extracting copper and zinc demanded technology that only corporations could afford. To work these arid mountains, companies had to entice labor from Europe, Mexico, and elsewhere in the U.S. Kennecott Copper Corporation built company towns for its smelter workers and open-pit copper miners, and smaller operations, like the zinc company that employed Esperanza's husband, leased houses to their workers in other mining hamlets that crept up the sides of mountains.
The social landscape shaped mining life as much as the physical landscape did. Some jobs were "Mexican" (usually labelled "Spanish"), the others "American," and the same went for neighborhoods, schools, and the ways people socialized with one another. Segregation relegated Mexicans and Chicanos to the worst jobs at the lowest pay. And their houses and living conditions reflected Chicanos' second-class status.
Mining was one of the most dangerous jobs on earth. But miners also learned that much could be done to make it safer -- effective partner systems, frequent rest breaks, 8-hour workdays, well-built timbering, good ventilation, and equipment that minimized inhaling silica and other rock dust. Workers often fought for safety measures as well as wages and fair promotions. And in all of these battles, New Mexican miners made good use of their union, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.
Mine-Mill, originally the Western Federation of Miners, had a militant and colorful history in the mountain West. Unfortunately its history also included racial exclusion, and until the 1930s it identified Mexicans as a threat ("cheap labor") rather than as potential union brothers. This began to change in the 1930s, when the leadership, influenced by the Communist Party, made anti-racism one of its organizing principles. Mine-Mill successfully began to organize Chicano miners in the Silver City area during World War II, and organized miners successfully began to challenge the injustices of the dual-wage system.
Mine-Mill earned its members' loyalty by encouraging democratic participation, developing Chicano leadership, and bringing the fight for ethnic equality out of the mines and into local businesses, schools, and voting booths. This history accounts for an important aspect of the domestic Cold War: anticommunists denouncing "red" unions like Mine-Mill utterly failed to persuade Chicano miners that their union was "un-American," much less that they were themselves dupes of Communism. Chicanos saw such attacks instead as a cover, transparent at best, for mining companies to destroy the union and thereby roll back what workers had won during the 1940s.
A critical moment arrived in September 1950. Miners struck the Empire Zinc Company in the small town of Hanover after the company had refused to maintain the partner system and confront the wage discrimination that accompanied job segregation. Both sides settled in for a long fight. In June 1951, Empire Zinc got a court injunction against "striking miners." The union men failed to come up with an alternative to their two dismal options: giving up the strike or going to jail.
But their wives had a plan. Having caucused before the fateful union meeting, several women offered to take the pickets in place of the "striking miners." Hardly any men welcomed this proposal. Only after much debate did the union men and women vote to "man" the pickets with women. This opera tells that story.
The strike and the struggle within the strike were both imbued with gender conflict. Underground mining was perhaps the most quintessentially male of all occupations: risky, arduous, demanding strength and endurance as well as skill. Its dangers made miners acutely dependent upon other miners, and men formed intense bonds with one another. This brotherhood, in fact, helped forge the union itself during the 1940s. Small wonder that men would balk at women's assuming their place on the pickets. And the threat to their authority in the household was perhaps even more acutely felt.
Particularly among families of Mexican origin, men occupied positions of ultimate authority, although they respected women's authority in their sphere -- home, children, family networks, and the church. Since mining towns offered few jobs to women, women tended to be economically dependent upon marriage. And the working conditions for miners' wives were grueling: no electricity, central heating, or running water made it that much harder to cook, wash, and care for their families.
But outside observers sometimes caricatured Mexican-American women as entirely submissive, passive, resigned to their hardship and their subordinate place, and the Empire Zinc strike was one of many pieces of evidence exposing that caricature as false. The Mine-Mill union, inspired by its Communist Party-influenced leadership, began to encourage women to step into public life through union auxiliaries and family meetings in the 1940s. When these activities were purely "social" and without lasting consequences, it is hardly surprising that many women's responses were only lukewarm. When they had the opportunity to become directly involved in action, however, women literally poured out of their homes onto the picket line and into meetings and decision-making. They were motivated in part by their understanding that a workers' victory would materially improve their lives. But in large measure they were responding to their own sense of justice and injustice, a passion just as powerful as that among men, and they sought the satisfaction of taking up an active position, of contributing not just to their families but to the whole community of Mexicans and mineworkers.
It is precisely this passion that attracted attention to the Empire Zinc strike from some unusual quarters: the blacklisted Hollywood community of the early 1950s. Casting about for a movie topic to produce outside Hollywood's studios, blacklisted filmmakers visited New Mexico during the Empire Zinc strike and returned to Los Angeles convinced that they'd hit gold. It took little to convince the mining families to participate in the film -- not just providing the "raw material," but actually debating its content and acting most of its roles.
This innovative collaboration between workers and artists was to have served as a model for many other cultural projects aimed, as the filmmakers put it, at dramatizing "the real lives of real working people." But one of McCarthyism's great triumphs was to stifle such possibilities. Local vigilantes beat up the film crew in New Mexico, immigration agents deported the lead actress (Rosaura Revueltas, a prominent Mexican actress), Hollywood bigwigs almost kept the film from even being processed, many movie theaters (and trade unions) refused to show it, and anticommunist politicians called for a Congressional investigation into this "Russian" propaganda being filmed so close to Los Alamos. The result: Salt of the Earth barely reached completion, and hardly anyone saw it.
But of course that is not the end of the story.
As the blacklist began to fade in the 1960s, more and more activists in the New Left, the women's liberation movement, and the Chicano movement rediscovered Salt of the Earth and discovered the same passion and humanity that had so moved the strikers and the filmmakers alike. This opera is thus part of a long tradition of bringing workers' struggles into new cultural expressions.