“The Anglo bosses look down on you, and you hate them for it,” Esperanza says to her husband, Ramon, in a poignant exchange during 1954’s Salt of the Earth. “‘Stay in your place, you dirty Mexican’—that’s what they tell you. But why must you say to me, ‘Stay in your place’?”
The scene from the blacklisted film dramatizing the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Co. in Silver City, New Mexico, never fails to spark discussions during the Working Class In Cinema course being taught at the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 324 in Buena Park. Chuck Adinolfi, field director for UFCW 324, and Matt Hart, a union representative with the same local, teach the three-hour, three-unit Los Angeles Trade Technical College class every Tuesday night.
“I like the class discussions because you understand different people’s perspectives,” says Raquel Avila, a student in the class, rank-and-file worker, and Teamsters Local 630 shop steward. Salt of the Earth is one of her favorite labor films, especially with its feminist union themes. “As a woman in the Teamsters, it’s male-dominated—let’s just be honest.”
The LA Trade Tech adjunct professors count 35 students, including Avila, for the current spring semester. “Most of the folks who are in the class are part of the labor community,” Hart says. It’s a mini-federation with Teamsters, UFCW, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), building trade and Wal-Mart workers joining students interested in getting transferrable units while learning more about the labor movement through film.
The course begins with lessons on how silent films waged class war on the silver screen at the turn of the 20th century, including 1912’s The Crime of Carelessness. “The film was made right after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire [where 145 workers died in New York City] and its purpose was for employers to sidestep their responsibility for it in trying to put the blame on the workers,” Hart says. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin’s Great Depression-era silent film Modern Times critiques industrialism’s effect on workers with wit and satire.
The talkies take it from there, with John Steinbeck’s novels-turned-films Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath offering students a regional look into the Great Depression. Salt of the Earth brings the class to the “Hollywood Ten” Red Scare era. “You had a film industry that actively tried to stop production,” Hart says of Salt of the Earth. Blacklisted director Herbert Biberman used union actors with the full support of local miners, but Hollywood wanted nothing to do with it. “And when the film actually debuted, there was only a handful of locations where it was shown, La Habra being one of them. We can’t teach this class without looking at that film.”
Working Class In Cinema then jumps around the decades to tackle how racism and sexism have played out in the labor movement before ending on contemporary films such as 2000’s Bread and Roses, about SEIU’s Justice for Janitors strike in LA. “We challenge our students to question everything, and if they don’t, we do,” says Adinolfi. “This is not a propaganda class. We’re going to challenge ourselves about things that we do wrong, what we can improve on and talk about things we do right.”
The “Matt and Chuck Show,” as the teachers have become affectionately known, not only dabbles in self-examination, but also pulls apart how cinema injects negative stereotypes into public opinions about unions. “When you think of a labor film, right off the top, you think Hoffa,” Hart says.
The 1992 Danny DeVito-directed biopic of disappeared Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa helped to popularize the idea of union leaders being Mafia-connected and on the take. “That’s the stereotype that sells movie tickets,” Adinolfi adds.
By the end of the class, students learn another invaluable lesson. “They develop a community of solidarity, [with] people from various unions interacting and engaging with one another,” Hart says. And the timing of that couldn’t be any more urgent, thanks to President Donald Trump making overtures to the “white working class” while poised to deliver near-fatal blows to unions.
A scene from Matewan (1987) dramatically illustrates the threats of redrawn lines of division. In the West Virginia coal-country film set in the 1920s, Joe Kenehan (played by Chris Cooper) gives a speech to a group of miners. “Every man that walks out on his own steam, we take him to the union,” Kenehan says while looking at “Few Clothes” Johnson (James Earl Jones).
“Even the dagos and the coloreds?” asks a miner.
“That’s what a union is, fellas,” Kenehan says.
The scene replays in Adinolfi’s mind in one organizing campaign after another, including a recent one in which friction arose between mostly white mechanics and Latino warehouse-freezer workers at Americold Logistics in Fullerton. “They voted against each other because their interests are different,” Adinolfi says. “It’s not just some historical moment in time that we’ve gone beyond.”
Even though Fullerton is far removed from early 20th-century coal country, Matewan resonates in and out of the classroom. “One of the questions that we ask with these films is ‘How is this relevant today?'” Hart says. “If they aren’t, then it doesn’t mean anything.”
Gabriel San Román is from Anacrime. He’s a journalist, subversive historian and the tallest Mexican in OC. He also once stood falsely accused of writing articles on Turkish politics in exchange for free food from DönerG’s!