Insight New Mexico - Dorinda Moreno

August 01, 2013

By V.B. Price

V.B. Price talks with Dorinda Moreno and Sadie Vialpando Williams about their efforts to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the landmark New Mexico film Salt of the Earth.

The film was released in 1954 and was based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. Originally banned in the United States during the height of the McCarthy scare it played to large audiences in Eastern and Western Europe during that time and gained wider recognition in the U.S. during the 1960's. The film eventually went on to become known as a seminal work, highly praised by critics and entered into the National Film Registry. The film tackled themes of feminism, labor rights and the treatment of Mexican Americans that were way ahead of its time in narrative cinema.

Deborah Rosenfelt wrote an in-depth review in 1976 which Dorinda has recommended.

The film will be commemorated nationally on March 8, 2014 (International Women's Day) and we hope to have Dorinda and Sadie back on the show as that day draws near.

View the film

This piece was written by:

V.B. Price

V.B. Price is editor and co-founder of New Mexico Mercury. He is the former editor of Century Magazine and New Mexico Magazine, former city editor of the New Mexico Independent, and long-time columnist for the late Albuquerque Tribune. His latest book is The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project. He retired as the editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at UNM Press in 2010. He has taught in the UNM Honors Program since l986.