national
Battalion/Page 13
March 31, 1982
Hispanic miner tours during movie’s return
Historic strike film gaining recognition
United Press International
SILVER CITY, N.M. — In
1953, a copper miner named
Juan Chacon was the lead actor
in a controversial movie written
by an Academy Award-winner
depicting an historic strike.
Chacon, a slightly built His
panic who said he was told on
the job that “the only thing the
company had for Mexicans was
laborers’ work,” said “getting
the part in the film surprised
me.”
But it was good type-casting.
The setting for both the movie
and the strike was Chacon’s
home area in the mountainous
copper country of southwestern
New Mexico.
Nearly 30 years later, both
Chacon and the film, “Salt of the
Earth,” appear to be on the
verge of gaining greater recog
nition than during the Red
Scare days when the movie was
produced.
Recently retired, the 61 -year-
old Chacon, who seldom has
been more than a day’s drive
from his rural home, plans to
accept invitations to travel much
of the world where the film is
being shown anew.
The movie was made against
great odds, including violent ac
tion by vigilantes responding to
rumors that the filmmakers
were Communists come to take
over Grant County, N.M.
“One guy had a gun on my
chest,” said Chacon, the soft-
spoken, Spanish-accented son of
a former sharecropper who died
three years ago at the age of 101.
The female star, Mexican ac
tress Rosaura Revueltas, was de
ported before the filming was
completed.
The stormy making of the
movie is the subject of a recent
made-for-television documen
tary, dedicated to Chacon, and
to the film’s director Herbert Bi-
berman and screen writer
Michael Wilson, both dead.
The 47-minute TV film, “A
Crime to Fit the Punishment,”
by New York producers
Stephen Mack and Barbara
Moss, is scheduled for its pre
miere at a special May 1 event at
Western New Mexico Universi
ty. The showing will be spon
sored by the New Mexico and
New York Councils on the
Humanities.
Chacon also was honored
Saturday night at a retirement
party thrown by members of
Group works ‘9 to 5’
to unionize workers
United Press International
WASHINGTON — The “9-
to-5” dream of unionizing
America’s 20 million secretarial
and clerical work force has
attained little success to date, but
union officials pledge a sus
tained campaign over several
decades.
Only two groups of workers
— at an insurance branch in
Syracuse, N.Y., and a labor law
firm in Philadelphia — have
voted tojoin the District 925 un
ion named for the hours of the
normal workday and made
famous by a movie and record
featuring Dolly Parton.
One year alter its creation
amid widespread publicity. Dis
trict 925 has attained bargaining
rights for only 101 members.
"It is a lifetime campaign,”
said John Sweeney, president of
the parent Service Employees
International Union, one of the
largest in the AFL-CIO with
more than 000,000 members.
“It will be going on for the
next 20 or 30 years,” Sweeney
predicted.
The Service Employees, with
about 50,000 clerical workers in
various other locals, embarked
on the effort jointly in March,
1981 , with Working Women, an
independent office employees
organization.
The goal was to attract office
workers — especially women
"ho comprise the vast majority
of that workforce — to orga
nised labor.
“We're not unrealistic”
Sweenev said. “We see the cleric
al workers in the 1980s as the
industrial workers were in the
1930s, government workers in
•he‘60s and health care workers
>n the ‘70s.’’
Jacqueline Ruff, who headed
Local 925 in Boston, which
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Local 890 of the Amalgamated
United Steel Workers, where he
served as president for 17 years.
“Salt of the Earth,” done in
semi-documentary style,
“We won a great vic
tory. (Before the strike)
we still had outside
toilets, no running wa
ter inside. Only two bed
room houses for six and
seven members of a
family. Very bad. “ Juan
Chacon
blended miners and their w ives
and children with professional
actors to portray one of this
country’s lesser known, but
more successful, civil rights
struggles.
It won high distinction inter
nationally, but received only
scarce commercial screening in
the United States because of the
movie industry’s blacklisting of
the principal makers of the film.
Billionaire Howard Hughes,
then a moviemaker himself,
wrote a congressman a lengthy
letter spelling out a plan to with
hold facilities to complete the
film and to bar its distribution.
The movie told of the Novem
ber 1949-March 1951 walkout,
in which Mexican-American
miners, backed by wives willing
to w'alk the picket lines and go to
jail for their cause, won an end
to discrimination against them.
The lengthy walkout was the
beginning of the end of a system
in the mines that kept Mexican-
Americans segregated in inade
quate housing, toilets and pay
lines, and barred their entrance
to the crafts or anything but
common labor.
“We won a great victory,”
Chacon said. “(Before the strike)
we still had outside toilets, no
running water inside. Only two
bedroom houses for six and
seven members of a family. Very
bad. In the theaters, we were
allowed to go in, but had to sit on
a different side (from the
Anglos).”
The strike was against Amer
ican Zinc, but it laid the ground
work for changing similar con
ditions under other companies
operating in the area, including
Kennecott Copper Corp.
Director Biberman w as one of
the “Hollywood Ten” jailed in
1947 and blacklisted by the
movie industry for failing to
cooperate with the House Un-
American Activities Committee.
Other blacklisted artists, un
able to find work in the movie
industry at the time, partici
pated. They included author
and screenwriter Paul Jarrico,
the movie’s producer, screen
writer Wilson and the late actor
Will Geer.
Wilson, winner of Academy
Awards for the screen plays of
Nearly 30 years later,
both Chacon and the
film, “Salt of the Earth, ”
appear to be on the
verge of gaining greater
recognition than during
the Red Scare days
when the movie was
produced.
“A Place in the Sun” and
“Bridge Over the River Kvvai,”
was the screenwriter. Geer, who
portrayed the union-busting
sherif f in the movie, later would
finally find work in movies again
and take the role of Grandpa
Walton in the longrunning hit
television series, “The Waltons.”
The film was selected by the
Academic du Cinema de Paris to
receive the International Grand
Prize for the best film shown in
France in 1955.
Chacon garnered some critic
al acclaim, but he did not win the
best actor award. That went
posthumously to the American;
star James Dean.
In the United States, where
“Salt of the Earth” was seen by'
very few people, the movie.
“Marty” and its star, Ernest
Borgnine, w r ere the Academy
Award winners.
A Time magazine review of
the film said:
“The best of the worker-
players is Juan Chacon, real-life
president of the local union.’ r
served as a catalyst for the
nationwide campaign and is now
executive director of District
925, also is not discouraged.
She said her group is involved
currently in various stages of
trying to organize 10,000 work
ers. That includes, she said,
working with leaders of local
groups, having workers sign
cards authorizing the union to
represent them in collective bar
gaining, or requesting a formal
representation election.
“It’s a very long-term invest
ment,” Ruff said. “It has to be
done carefully. It has to be done
with a certain amount of re
sources. It has to be done with a
certain kind of expertise.
“We can see it growing. We
can see it there.
“I go into a meeting of 50
office workers who are in
terested in unionizing and ask
how many of you have been in a
union before and one person
raises her hand and that was
when she was working as a sales
clerk in a supermarket, so you
have to cover a lot of ground and
prepare them for the anti-union
consultants and so on.”
However, the only significant
election victory by District 925
during its first year came Feb. 4
when workers at the Syracuse,
N.Y., group benefits branch of
Equitable Life Assurance Socie
ty voted 49-40 tojoin the union.
“They heard about us last
summer,” she said. “It took
them about a month to find us.”
T he insurance industry is one
of the least unionized in the na
tion, and Ruff said District 925
was wary because no union had
succeeded in organizing the
Equitable workforce, and be
cause the firm had an outside
consultant firm which she de
scribed as “major union-
busters.”
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