On Strike and on Film: Mexican American Families and Blacklisted Filmmakers in Cold War America » (New Edition)

Ellen R. Baker is associate professor of history at Columbia University.

In 1950, Mexican American miners went on strike for fair working conditions in Hanover, New Mexico. When an injunction prohibited miners from picketing, their wives took over the picket lines--an unprecedented act that disrupted mining families but ultimately ensured the strikers' victory in 1952. In On Strike and on Film, Ellen Baker examines the building of a leftist union that linked class justice to ethnic equality. She shows how women's participation in union activities paved the way for their taking over the picket lines and thereby forcing their husbands, and the union, to face troubling questions about gender equality.

Acknowledgments     xi
Abbreviations     xiii
Introduction     1
Grant County's Mining District     17
Crisis
Class Conflict in the Mines, 1930-1950     45
Competing Models of Unionism     85
The Women's Picket
Political Consciousness and Community Formation     119
Household Relations     151
A Worker-Artist Alliance
The Blacklist     177
A Progressive Vision of Popular Culture     192
Anticommunist Assaults     223
Conclusion     244
Notes     255
Bibliography     317
Index     339