Silver City Theatre is bringing the Si Kahn Musical Mother Jones in Heaven to Light Hall Theatre on January 9 and 10 at 6pm. A solo show performed by SAG-Aftra actor Vivian Nesbitt. Tickets can be purchased online at www.silvercitytheatre.com
What Mother Jones Would Say to Grant County Labor Leaders Today An op-ed for the Silver City Daily Press
If Mother Jones were to step onto Bullard Street today, she would recognize the look on people's faces.
She would see it in the barista juggling three jobs.
In the elder bagging groceries long past retirement.
In the teacher quietly buying notebooks and pencils with their own money.
In the care worker lifting bodies and spirits for wages that barely lift rent.
In the gig worker refreshing an app, waiting for the next task.
Grant County has always been a place where people work hard. That is not our problem. Our problem is that hard work here is too often met with scarcity, instability, and silence.
Mother Jones knew this terrain well. She stood with miners in places like ours—communities built around extraction, sacrifice, and the promise that if you just worked hard enough, security would follow. It didn't then. And it doesn't now.
Mining still looms large in Grant County's identity. Even as the industry has changed, its legacy remains: boom-and-bust economics, health consequences borne by workers, and families left to absorb the fallout when corporations move on. The wealth extracted from the land has rarely stayed long enough to build lasting security for the people who live on it.
But today, labor in Grant County is no longer just about mines. It's about fragmentation.
It's about gig work replacing steady jobs—delivery drivers, freelance creatives, remote piecework—where workers shoulder all the risk and none of the protection. It's about cannabis workers entering a new industry with promise but little clarity around labor standards, long-term stability, or collective power. It's about service workers and artists sustaining Silver City's cultural life while struggling to find housing they can afford or even find at all.
Housing is not a side issue—it is a labor issue. When workers cannot live in the community they serve, something fundamental is broken. Teachers commuting from farther and farther away. Care workers couch-surfing. Young people leaving because they simply cannot make the math work. A labor market without housing is not a market—it's a trap.
Mother Jones would not be surprised to learn that elders in Grant County are working well past the age when rest should be earned. Not because they want to stay busy, but because Social Security, pensions, and savings do not stretch far enough. When elders are forced to work to survive, that is not dignity—it is policy failure disguised as virtue.
She would also notice the quiet heroism of care work here: people caring for aging parents, for neighbors, for clients with disabilities, for children. Care work is the backbone of every community, yet it remains among the least protected and least compensated labor we have. Mother Jones called this kind of exploitation by its real name: theft.
And she would absolutely notice our schools.
She would notice teachers in Grant County buying paper, markers, snacks, and supplies out of their own pockets. She would ask why educators are treated as volunteers in a system that depends entirely on their labor. She would remind us that when teachers are underpaid and overburdened, the cost is passed directly to children.
Mother Jones did not believe labor struggles were abstract or theoretical. She believed they lived in kitchens, classrooms, hospital rooms, and pay envelopes. She believed that when people stop telling these stories, power rushes in to rewrite them.
Which brings us to why she still matters now.
On January 9 and 10 at 6pm, Mother Jones in Heaven will be performed at Light Hall on the Western New Mexico University campus. The play imagines Mother Jones looking back on her life—and forward at ours—asking what has changed, what hasn't, and why the fight for dignity at work never seems to end.
This is not a history lesson. It is a mirror.
The issues Mother Jones fought—unsafe work, poverty wages, corporate power, political indifference—are alive and well in Grant County. They've simply learned to wear softer language. "Flexible." "Seasonal." "Independent contractor." "Entry-level." Words that sound neutral until you live inside them.
Mother Jones would caution local labor leaders, policymakers, and employers against mistaking calm for contentment. Grant County workers are not apathetic. They are exhausted. And exhaustion is not the absence of anger—it is anger with nowhere to go.
She would urge leaders to stop treating labor as a single-issue concern and start seeing the full ecosystem: housing, healthcare, education, transportation, childcare, and elder care. You cannot fix wages without fixing rent. You cannot fix schools without fixing respect for teachers. You cannot celebrate new industries without protecting the workers who make them profitable.
Most of all, she would tell us to tell the truth out loud.
Tell the truth about who this county depends on.
Tell the truth about who is struggling.
Tell the truth about who benefits—and who doesn't.
Theater cannot pass laws or negotiate contracts. But it can do something just as dangerous: it can make people feel less alone. It can remind us that our struggles are shared, not personal failures.
Mother Jones once said, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." Grant County is full of the living—working, caring, teaching, harvesting, delivering, healing, and aging in place.
The question she would leave us with is simple:
What are we willing to fight for now?
Mother Jones in Heaven runs January 9 and 10 at 6pm at Light Hall on the WNMU campus. The conversation it invites is not confined to the stage. It belongs to all of us who live and work here. Tickets are available at www.silvercitytheatre.com.
