Examples Of Connotation In Salt Of The Earth

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Pages: 4
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Yula Dos Santos Costa
CINE 331
Prof. Shimizu

Salt Of The Earth
Denotation and Connotation In the film Salt of the Earth, by Herbert Biberman, the character Esperanza narrates the beginning of the story of her husband as a worker in the dark mines, despite being a place she does not know: "I am the wife of a miner. Eighteen years my husband gave that mine, living half of his life between dynamite and darkness." In the scene we see a juxtaposition of images where Esperanza is hanging clothes outside, while her husband is shown in the mines, working. She tells us about the loss of lands to the big mining companies, how the families live, and shows the difference of Anglo and Chicano housing as a mark of discrimination and prejudice. The …show more content…
In analyzing the first ten minutes we have the answer, both through the scene and through the narration of Esperanza, to the issues related to work and ethnic relations. Esperanza’s narration, made in voice over, is the entrance door of the spectator to the world of working in the mines. In questioning their history, Esperanza is not unaware of its origin, but rather the moment when its people, Americans descendants from Mexicans, began to be treated as second-class citizens. In her article “Ideology and structure in Salt of the Earth,” Deborah Rosenfelt also argues that “the film depicts the inevitable antagonism between labor and management, the long history of tension between Mexican American and Anglo, and the more recent tension between the women and the men as …show more content…
Esperanza takes to herself the narration of the film as a way to show the group transformation of the women and men of Zinc Town. For this she uses the narration to present not only herself, but also the place where she lives, her husband and his work in the mine. Rosenfelt also recalls that “we must see Esperanza and Ramon as part of an entire community, their struggle representing and synthesizing the struggles of the community as a whole.” The film shows that the vast majority of Mexican descendants had their lives marked by the struggle against both ethnic discrimination and equality in working conditions. This struggle, which transcends the context of labor relations, is the product of the historical and political struggles that Mexicans and Americans have been fighting since the time of the War between the United States and Mexico, and which, to this day, brings countless reflections not only in the American Southwest but also in the history of those peoples. The central theme in Salt of the Earth involves the struggle of Mexican-American miners against inequality and the improvement of their lives in a brutal dispute between capital and labor. From this point on, the way forward must show the moments, both within the film and in labor history, whose struggles are
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