Refocusing Latinx Labor in Salt of the Earth and Why Cybraceros?

Borderless Cultures Film Festival presents this conversation about Latinx Labor in the 1954 film SALT OF THE EARTH and the 1997 short film WHY CYBRACEROS? with the participation of director ALEX RIVERA and DR. IRENE MATA.

The production history of SALT OF THE EARTH is a long and complicated one, but it always overshadows the revolutionary content of the film, effectively erasing Latinx labor. The film admirably tackles ideas of race, class, gender and national identity by rejecting the American dream in favor of basic human rights with an intersectional feminist challenge to white patriarchy and machismo. With such a potent legacy, this conversation begins by asking why many latinx representations in pop cultures during the subsequent 70 years have failed to uphold the messages of this film.

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ACT NOW! Sign the petition here

The deportation of immigrants due to labor organizing or criticizing the government has been commonplace in U.S. history. In the latest example, Claudio Rojas, one of the protagonists from The Infiltrators, was detained by ICE and deported days after the film’s screening at Sundance Film Festival. He is now in the Krome Detention Center in South Miami-Dade. “It is of grave concern to the documentary community that a willing protagonist in a documentary film may be punished for expressing his opinion within a film, and we believe that this will have a chilling effect on the work of journalists and their sources seeking to explore and understand issues of national concern.”

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ABOUT SALT OF THE EARTH

WATCH FULL MOVIE

Set in a small mining community in New Mexico, SALT OF THE EARTH was written by Michael Wilson and directed by Herbert Biberman, both blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers during the Red Scare, the film chronicles the true events of a 1951 Mexican American miners’ strike in the area using local people and non-actors to re-enact their experiences.The film centers on the miners' wives, especially Esperanza Quintero (Rosaura Revueltas), who must combat sexism and racism on both sides of the conflict to build a better future for her family.

Completed against all odds (including Revueltas’ deportation to Mexico), the film was denounced as Communist propaganda when it was completed in 1953. Distributors boycotted it, newspapers and radio stations rejected advertisements for it, and the projectionists’ union refused to run it. Ultimately screened in less than 12 theaters nationwide in 1954, the film highlights the complexity of gender, labor, and family relationships during a hostile political climate.

ABOUT WHY CYBRACEROS? (1997)

WHY CYBRACEROS? sarcastically uses the form of a promotional film. It is based on a real promotional film produced in the late 1950’s by the California Grower’s Council, titled ‘Why Braceros?’ This film was used by the Grower’s Council to defend the use of Braceros, or temporary Mexican farmhands. Rivera recycles footage from this short to lay out the history of the Bracero Program in the United States.

At the half way point the piece takes a sharp turn as the narrator advocates a futuristic Bracero Program in which only the labor is imported to the United States. This dystopic concept, visualizes a world in which immigrants can labor in America but never live in, or become the responsibility of American society. The workers themselves (Cybraceros) are left at home in Mexico, as they tele-commute to American farms over the high-speed internet. The narrator explains that in this imagined future there is no difference between rich and poor on the internet, this is a future in which truly everyone can work from home, even braceros.

ABOUT BORDERLESS CULTURES

Knowing that popular culture constructs, informs, and reflects, Borderless Cultures brings together filmmakers and scholars to share films that are otherwise not in wide release to talk about about Latinx peoples and film. Thus, we selected films that tell us something about the U.S. racialization of Latinx peoples.

Conceived between collaborators and colleagues on opposite coasts, Borderless Cultures is our offering to gather across space, and share time and ideas. Bringing his talents as a content creator and art educator, Ramos- Barajas thinks through narrative and artistic vision, while Professor Rodríguez fixates on historical context and the value of scholarly analysis. Our goal is to reframe Latinx histories— and by extension, the interlaced histories of Indigenous, Mexican, Black & Anglo peoples— in what today is the South and West of the United States.