While “Salt of the Earth” echoed many of the themes we’ve been studying in class (ownership of the land, justice, constructed spaces, and so on), one that struck me in particular was that of citizenship, of belonging to and inhabiting a certain area. The film makes the case that the striking miners are native to and connected with the area they are working in. They pull zinc from the land; they plant flowers in it and hunt from it; they collect its wood for heating water and use its sun to dry their clothes. In some cases the miners and their families have lived in the area for generations. They don’t know any other home.
43 minutes into the film, Esperanza explains a tactic that the company bosses are using to turn Anglo workers against their striking peers: “They say that all Mexicans ought to be sent back to where they came from.” One of the miners notes that he was born in the area (but on company property). Another asks: “Why don’t nobody ever tell the bosses to go back to where they come from?” In this case, the outsiders are the Anglo bosses working for the Delaware mining company. In either case, it’s impossible to send people back. Mexican-Americans can’t be “sent back” to Mexico when they were born in the US and have lived in the area for generations. The bosses can’t be sent back to Oklahoma or whatever their home states were—because if you go back far enough, their ancestors didn’t come from there either, and where do you draw the line?
This is a theme that has popped up in our other readings too—it’s a pressing concern for the environmental movement, which has to decide how it wants to approach the issue of the changing face of habitation of the world.
In Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, for instance, Anne Dillard brings up starlings, which were introduced from Europe and are now firmly entrenched in America. The starlings can’t be exterminated; they’re now as much a part of the landscape as any of the species living on it prior to their arrival.
Likewise, in several essays, Barry Lopez describes the new areas that have been changed by man and reinhabited as a result. In “The Stone Horse,” Lopez mentions that human irrigation changed the climate of the Sonoran Desert, allowing new species of plants and animals to take hold. In “Gone Back Into The Earth,” it’s the Grand Canyon that’s been changed, with new species of fish taking over a river that’s been altered in temperature and character since the creation of a dam upstream.
Are these new inhabitants “invasive”? Should they be removed? Several recent New Scientist articles have also touched on this issue, and they come down on the side of the newcomers.
The first article argues that newcomer species (like coyotes, which fill the niches abandoned by wolves) deserve life as much as the species they’ve replaced. (Link) The second article notes that cane toads, an invasive species in Australia, have been largely absorbed into the native ecosystem without causing a catastrophe. (Link)
Like people in the varying waves of human settlement worldwide, these newcomer species can’t be excised without again changing the ecosystem. The world can’t be returned to the way it was, logistically or ethically. The starlings can’t be removed from Tinker Creek, nor can cane toads be extracted from Australia, nor can the Mexican-American miners or their Anglo bosses be banished from New Mexico. All that’s really possible is for the newcomers to find ways to coexist with “native” species without destroying the ecosystem, which is something that cane toads seem to have done and which, hopefully, humans can become better at also.
Wonderfully written!
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