Blacklisted Mexican Film Actress Dies

Rosaura Revueltas, the Mexican actress best remembered for the human rights film “Salt of the Earth,” which ironically cut short her career, has died.

She was believed to be 86, although she claimed to be a decade younger.

Revueltas died Tuesday at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, of lung cancer.

In the 1953 film, which has become a cult favorite, Revueltas portrayed Esperanza Quintero, the pregnant wife of a Mexican worker in a New Mexico zinc mine who became involved in a violent strike. The film has been praised in Europe and the Americas as an early account of workers’ and women’s rights.

Made in Silver City, N.M., at the height of the McCarthy era, the film was financed by the International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union, which had been expelled by a forerunner of the AFL-CIO when leaders refused to sign anticommunist statements.

Four of the film’s American principals - producer Paul Jarrico, director Herbert Biberman, writer Michael Wilson and actor Will Geer - were blacklisted.

Revueltas herself was arrested for illegally entering the United States and later was deported after a conservative California congressman, Donald Jackson, insisted the film was being made by a “bunch of communists” as a “new weapon for Russia.”

Final work on the motion picture was made in Mexico to accommodate its star.

But Revueltas then was banned from acting in Mexico as well as the United States, ending her career.