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UNA MUJER SIN FRONTERAS Author(S): V UNA MUJER SIN FRONTERAS Author(s): V. RUIZ Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (February 2004), pp. 1-20 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2004.73.1.1 . Accessed: 03/09/2015 16:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Pacific Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.95.88.190 on Thu, 3 Sep 2015 16:13:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 01-C2944 1/23/04 6:39 AM Page 1 Una Mujer sin Fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism VICKI L. RUIZ The author is a member of the department of history at the University of California, Irvine. This was her presidential address at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, AHA, in Honolulu, in August 2003. Making strategic choices regarding her class and ethnic identification for the cause of social justice, Luisa Moreno was the most visible Latina labor and civil rights activist in the United States during the Great Depression and World War II. Vice- president of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of Amer- ica (UCAPAWA-CIO), this charismatic Guatemalan immigrant organized farm and cannery workers across the Southwest, achieving particular success among Mexican and Russian Jewish women in southern California plants. In 1939 she was also the driving force behind El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (the Congress of Spanish-speaking Peoples), the first national Latino civil rights assembly. A feminist and leftist, she faced government harassment and red-baiting in the late 1940s, espe- cially for her past Communist Party membership. “One person can’t do anything; it’s only with others that things are accomplished.” Luisa Moreno The years of the Great Depression and World War II stand as the golden era of the American labor movement, with the auto workers staging a dramatic sit-in at Flint, Michigan, John L. Lewis setting up a national confederation of factory workers into the pow- erful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the charis- matic A. Philip Randolph organizing African American railroad porters. Luisa Moreno ranks among these icons of labor history, yet her story remains virtually unknown outside of Latino Studies. I would like to thank Lynn Bolles, Susan Ferber, Catherine Clinton, and especially Valerie Matsumoto and Nancy Hewitt for their incisive suggestions and insights. I also thank Albert Camarillo for introducing me to Luisa Moreno in 1978, and I look forward to our joint venture in crafting a full-fledged biography on her. Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1, pages 1–20. ISSN 0030-8684 ©2004 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 1 This content downloaded from 128.95.88.190 on Thu, 3 Sep 2015 16:13:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 01-C2944 1/23/04 6:39 AM Page 2 2 Pacific Historical Review Organizing briefly with Lewis in Pennsylvania and a contemporary of Randolph, Luisa Moreno remains the only transcontinental Latina union organizer, as her work, indeed her passion, carried her across the country, from the garment shops of New York City to ci- gar plants in Tampa to canneries in Los Angeles, with many stops in between. An immigrant from Guatemala, she was the first Latina vice-president of a major union, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), which in its heyday was the seventh-largest CIO affiliate. But her most notable “first” was as the driving force behind El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (the Congress of Spanish-speaking Peoples), the first na- tional Latino civil rights assembly. Born Blanca Rosa Rodríguez López on August 30, 1907, Moreno had a most unlikely childhood for a future trade union leader. She grew up surrounded by wealth and privilege in her na- tive Guatemala. Her mother, Alicia López Sarana, originally from Colombia, was a prominent socialite married to Ernesto Rodríguez Robles, a powerful coffee grower. With the help of a coterie of ser- vants and tutors, Alicia and Ernesto reared four children, one son and three daughters, on their sprawling estate. Luisa, receiving an education appropriate for her station and gender, spoke Spanish and French and showed an early aptitude for poetry. She remem- bered her father as a “real person,” but her mother as “a peacock,” who never emerged from her boudoir until eleven o’clock in the morning. At the age of eight, Luisa was stricken with a high fever, and the local doctor offered little hope for her recovery. Her father prayed for her life, promising that he would consecrate her to God by sending her to a convent in preparation for religious life. Luisa recovered, and, true to his word, in 1916 Ernesto and his nine-year- old daughter boarded a steamship bound for California, where Luisa would attend the Convent of the Holy Names in Oakland.1 Moreno had less than fond memories of the four and a half years at the convent. There she experienced her first bout with 1. “Data on Luisa Moreno Bemis,” file 53, Robert W. Kenny Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies Research, Los Angeles (hereafter referred to as the Kenny Collection); interviews with Luisa Moreno, Aug. 4, 1984, July 27, 1978, conducted by the author; “Handwritten Notes by Robert Kenny,” file 53, Kenny Collection. After the first references (which include the interviewer’s name), all interviews will be cited by the name of the interviewee and the date. This content downloaded from 128.95.88.190 on Thu, 3 Sep 2015 16:13:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 01-C2944 1/23/04 6:39 AM Page 3 Luisa Moreno 3 discrimination. A classmate made a remark about “Spanish pigs so I belted her.” Her convent experiences, especially the hypocrisy she witnessed during Lent, when she and the other girls subsisted on bread and water while the nuns dined on sumptuous food, turned her away from Catholicism in particular and organized reli- gion in general. She begged to return home, and finally her parents relented. Back in Guatemala, Luisa at the age of fifteen desired a uni- versity education but soon discovered that women were barred from such lofty pursuits. So she began to organize her elite peers into the Sociedad Gabriela Mistral to push for greater educational opportuni- ties for women. They relied on petition drives and informal lobby- ing, the traditional political tools for elite women. At approximately the same moment that U.S. suffragists had secured passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote in 1920, a teenage Moreno mobilized a cadre of well-heeled young women to claim the right to higher education. One Guatemalan history book, La Patria del Criollo, paid them tribute as “una generación que hizo historia” (a generation that made history). With success in sight, Moreno prepared to take her place among the inaugural class of university women. Before entering the halls of academe, however, she experienced a change of heart. Despite her youthful activism, she was fully aware of her fam- ily’s place in Guatemalan society, and the cultural and class expec- tations weighed heavily on her own future. When one of her siblings married, her father had the fountain on the family compound filled with expensive Veuve Cliquot champagne. Perhaps filled with a sense of adventure and certainly with a streak of rebelliousness, Luisa chafed at the constraints on her spirit and creativity that her family’s most privileged world would entail. Rejecting her family wealth and status, she ran away to Mexico City. By the age of nineteen, she had ensconced herself in the world of the bohemian cultural elite. Well-known for her beauty and po- etry, the young Latina flapper supported herself as a journalist cov- ering society stories and writing a children’s column, as she con- sorted with the likes of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The few possessions she clung to throughout her many trav- els included her own slim volume of verse, El Vendedor de Cocuyos (Seller of Fireflies [1927]) and newspaper reviews of her work, as This content downloaded from 128.95.88.190 on Thu, 3 Sep 2015 16:13:45 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 01-C2944 1/23/04 6:39 AM Page 4 4 Pacific Historical Review well as drafts of unpublished poems, usually written on scraps of pa- per. El Vendedor de Cocuyos reveals a youthful poet with a deep ap- preciation of the natural world and the human condition, a woman unafraid of expressing desire openly and honestly. One treasured clipping referred to her as both a gentle compatriot and vanguard feminist. In Mexico, her feminism was situated in self-expression and creativity rather than political action. In this heady, avant-garde atmosphere, she married caricature artist Miguel Angel de León, a man sixteen years her senior.
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