you are a kid in the 1950s, and what seems an unstoppable onslaught of messages from every front is telling you that you have to be like them, not like you, and even your own family is telling you that for your own good you have to be Alfred, not Alfredo, and that Alfred should be careful where he speaks Spanish and to whom and never ever even hint that his family had been deported and to proclaim loudly albeit untruthfully that everyone in the family including the dog was made in America. Even a kid wonders why the leaders of the Mexican-American community mostly attack Mexicans, even though they are careful to point out they only attack the wetback kind. In the 1940s and ’50s the border was not yet a war zone. Folks went back and forth with relative ease, the neighbors may have arrived without papers and stayed, heck, half the town may have arrived without papers. As a little kid I used to ask my father what a wetback was, and he would explain that the origin of the word referred to crossing the Rio Grande with no papers, but now it meant all Mexicans without papers. Mexicans without papers were wetbacks. I think that made sense when I was five or six. By the time I was twelve or so I began to wonder whether this Dr. García guy had his head screwed on right. And perhaps only years afterwards did I grasp that these so-called leaders of the Mexican-American community had, for doubtless the most selfless of reasons, adopted the rhetoric of the nativists in order to achieve ends opposed by the nativists. They were cowed, I thought, by the seeming power and popularity of hate, so they hoped to sound just like the racists in order to demonstrate that they and presumably the cleaned-up, round-sounding English-speaking Americans of Mexican descent whom they claimed to speak for weren’t really like those dirty Mexicans the racists hated. The logic was as convoluted as my attempt to explain it. The tactic was foolish, and ultimately discredited. Unfortunately, in the century to come, mainstream Washington-based Latino and immigrant rights groups would adopt the shameful tactic and suffer the same fate.
In the tough mining town of Miami, the anti-immigrant hysteria played out with a difference. In much of the southwest, perhaps the only voices Latinos heard speaking out on their behalf were those of the compromised, often servile LULAC and GI Forum. In Miami and in a few other places across the country there were alternative voices. Their message, because it was diametrically opposed to the prevailing dirge, was all the more startling. And to young Mexican Americans, uncomfortable with the constant pressure to conform, it would have sounded all the more intriguing and exciting. In Miami, it was the Union.
By 1950 the Miami Copper Company had opened a new open pit mine in the Sleeping Beauty mountain ridge, about twenty miles from the town. The company had reached a sweetheart deal with United Steelworkers to be the lead union and for the first time to accept Mexican members, my father among them. The company was responding to intense pressure to break the Mine Mill union, because of its “subservience to the Communist Party.” Time magazine, in the 1950s perhaps the most powerful single publication, described how the Mine Mill was tossed out of the CIO:
The C.I.O. was cleaning out one more Red-infested corner of its labor empire. This time the man in the corner was 39-year-old Maurice Travis, boss of the militant Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers … “Only the Communist assumption that what is good for the Soviet Union is good for American labor could justify Mine-Mill’s position. Only constant subservience to the Communist Party can explain it.” Mine-Mill, said Potofsky [the CIO official who presented the indictment against the Mine Mill], was dominated and its policies set by a four-member steering committee, which took its orders from … the hierarchy of the Communist Party. The Reds ran the union newspaper, its organizing staff and its leadership … Travis denied the charges, declared that the hearing was a “kangaroo court.” But C.I.O. President Philip Murray gave him short shrift. He threw Mine-Mill out of the C.I.O.16
Red-infested or not, the Mine Mill remained for another fifteen years the voice of the Mexican community in the mining strip of Arizona and eastern New Mexico. The leadership of Local 586 in Miami, Roberto Barcon, Kikes Pastor (father of future Congressman Ed Pastor), Elias Lazarin, and the regional organizer Maclovio Barraza, were treated with deference in the town. Barcon and Barraza were both named communists by a Congressional committee, which led to the often-whispered wisdom, “If Barcon and Barraza are communists, then communists must be some pretty good people.” The Union responded to every act of discrimination in the town. In time the schools were integrated, the Y’s Christian pool became open to Mexicans every day of the week, and the Irish priest deigned to give Mexicans communion from the same silver service as he did the white folk. The Union maintained its fierce opposition to the dual pay system in any form and challenged the Company on discriminatory promotion practices. The skilled crafts––electricians, carpenters, welders––always a bastion of white workers as long any old-timer could remember, opened to its first Mexican members. Arnold Rojas, a lifelong Union member, became the first Latino electrician at Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company, and my father the first at Miami Copper Company’s Sleeping Beauty Mine.
Mine Mill was instrumental in forming a progressive Mexican-American national organization that would unabashedly fight for the rights of Mexican workers and families, be they documented, undocumented, or braceros. The Asociación Nacional México-Americana (ANMA) formed in response to angry Union members who were beaten and abused by the sheriff of Grants, in New Mexico. A legal defense was mounted on their behalf, a successful political campaign to defeat the sheriff was organized. In the aftermath the Union came to the realization that a national organization to aggressively defend the rights of Mexican-American working people was needed.17 The initial membership was drawn from the members of Mine Mill and from the progressive unions that had also been forced out of the CIO by anti-communist hysteria. ANMA grew quickly. Within four years there were local branches in almost every Western community in which progressive labor had a presence: Los Angeles, San Francisco, El Paso, Phoenix, Denver, Tucson, Albuquerque, and of course every mining community in the southwest. One of ANMA’s significant organizers was a very young former president of the Longshoremen’s local in San Francisco, the future founder of the Mexican American Political Association and soon to become one of the most important political and community leaders of the Latino community: Bert Corona.
ANMA aggressively fought discrimination on every front and—unlike LULAC, the Forum, and even the predecessor to Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, the National Agriculture Workers Union—organized braceros to fight the wanton abuse to which they were often subjected.18
Mine Mill and ANMA were both important players in the making of perhaps the most significant and realistic film of Mexican life in mining towns, depicting for the first time the powerful role of women in Mexican life: Salt of the Earth. On the morning of October 15, 1950, the miners at the underground Empire Zinc mine in Hanover, New Mexico, mounted a picket line at the gates. Mine Mill had demanded an end to the dual wage system, wherein Mexican workers were paid less than their white counterparts for doing the same job, and for their wages to be raised to the industry standard. The company refused. The strike began when the workers surfaced from below. The strike was not unlike any other in the parched hills of the mining strip that ran from northern Mexico, through Arizona, and into western New Mexico. Strikes were a tough drama that dominated the region while they lasted, but the mining towns’ isolation meant that they rarely received much notice in the major cities. What transformed the Empire Zinc strike was the company’s decision that it would reopen with non-union labor. In preparation for what they perceived as their ultimate defeat of Mine Mill, the Company asked for an injunction against further picketing by the Union. On June 12, 1951, a federal judge dutifully granted it.19
The Union’s meeting that evening was contentious and angry. It was doubtful that future action would be possible. Defeat seemed imminent. But the gloom lifted when the wife of one of the workers pointed out that the injunction was against striking miners. The wives were not miners, “so they could picket and the Sheriff would have no authority to stop them.” Macho Mexican men first scoffed at the notion, but when they realized the women were serious, mockery gave way to stunned disbelief, followed by vociferous objections. The meeting lasted for hours. “We had a hard time convincing the men but we finally did, by a vote,” Braulia Velázquez, an outspoken wife, would comment later. An unusual provision in the Mine Mill’s bylaws
