UNA MUJER SIN FRONTERASAuthor(s): V. RUIZSource: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (February 2004), pp. 1-20Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/phr.2004.73.1.1 .Accessed: 04/05/2011 17:04

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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.

I would like to thank Lynn Bolles, Susan Ferber, Catherine Clinton, and especiallyValerie Matsumoto and Nancy Hewitt for their incisive suggestions and insights. I alsothank Albert Camarillo for introducing me to Luisa Moreno in 1978, and I look forwardto our joint venture in crafting a full-fledged biography on her.

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 CoastBranch, 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 andcannery workers across the Southwest, achieving particular success among Mexicanand Russian Jewish women in southern California plants. In 1939 she was also thedriving force behind El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española (the Congress ofSpanish-speaking Peoples), the first national Latino civil rights assembly. A feministand 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 standas the golden era of the American labor movement, with the autoworkers staging a dramatic sit-in at Flint, Michigan, John L. Lewissetting 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 railroadporters. Luisa Moreno ranks among these icons of labor history, yet her story remains virtually unknown outside of Latino Studies.

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1. “Data on Luisa Moreno Bemis,” file 53, Robert W. Kenny Collection, SouthernCalifornia Library for Social Studies Research, Los Angeles (hereafter referred to as theKenny Collection); interviews with Luisa Moreno, Aug. 4, 1984, July 27, 1978, conductedby the author; “Handwritten Notes by Robert Kenny,” file 53, Kenny Collection. After thefirst references (which include the interviewer’s name), all interviews will be cited by thename of the interviewee and the date.

Organizing briefly with Lewis in Pennsylvania and a contemporaryof Randolph, Luisa Moreno remains the only transcontinentalLatina union organizer, as her work, indeed her passion, carried heracross 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 Latinavice-president of a major union, the United Cannery, Agricultural,Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), which in itsheyday was the seventh-largest CIO affiliate. But her most notable“first” was as the driving force behind El Congreso de Pueblos de HablanEspañola (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 unionleader. She grew up surrounded by wealth and privilege in her na-tive Guatemala. Her mother, Alicia López Sarana, originally fromColombia, was a prominent socialite married to Ernesto RodríguezRobles, a powerful coffee grower. With the help of a coterie of ser-vants and tutors, Alicia and Ernesto reared four children, one sonand three daughters, on their sprawling estate. Luisa, receiving aneducation appropriate for her station and gender, spoke Spanishand 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 themorning. At the age of eight, Luisa was stricken with a high fever,and the local doctor offered little hope for her recovery. Her fatherprayed for her life, promising that he would consecrate her to Godby sending her to a convent in preparation for religious life. Luisarecovered, and, true to his word, in 1916 Ernesto and his nine-year-old daughter boarded a steamship bound for California, whereLuisa would attend the Convent of the Holy Names in Oakland.1

Moreno had less than fond memories of the four and a halfyears at the convent. There she experienced her first bout with

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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 parentsrelented.

Back in Guatemala, Luisa at the age of fifteen desired a uni-versity education but soon discovered that women were barred fromsuch lofty pursuits. So she began to organize her elite peers into theSociedad 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 approximatelythe same moment that U.S. suffragists had secured passage of theNineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote in 1920,a teenage Moreno mobilized a cadre of well-heeled young womento claim the right to higher education. One Guatemalan historybook, La Patria del Criollo, paid them tribute as “una generación quehizo historia” (a generation that made history). With success insight, Moreno prepared to take her place among the inaugural classof 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 siblingsmarried, her father had the fountain on the family compound filledwith expensive Veuve Cliquot champagne. Perhaps filled with asense of adventure and certainly with a streak of rebelliousness,Luisa chafed at the constraints on her spirit and creativity that herfamily’s most privileged world would entail.

Rejecting her family wealth and status, she ran away to MexicoCity. By the age of nineteen, she had ensconced herself in the worldof 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 FridaKahlo. 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

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2. Interview with Berthe Small, Alba Zatz, and Asa Zatz, Sept. 28, 1996, conductedby the author; Moreno interview, 1984; Jacksonville Journal, Sept. 23, 1943; French ForeignLegion Handbook of Miguel Angel de León (in author’s possession); interview with LuisaMoreno, August 5, 1976, conducted by Albert Camarillo; “Data on Luisa Moreno Bemis.”

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 womanunafraid of expressing desire openly and honestly. One treasuredclipping referred to her as both a gentle compatriot and vanguardfeminist. In Mexico, her feminism was situated in self-expressionand creativity rather than political action.

In this heady, avant-garde atmosphere, she married caricatureartist Miguel Angel de León, a man sixteen years her senior. A dash-ing figure with a mysterious past, he pursued the young poet. LikeLuisa, Miguel had grown up in an elite family in Guatemala, and he,too, had yearned for adventure. In 1914, at the age of twenty-three,he had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and fought in WorldWar I. Ten years later he resided in Mexico City, a fixture within theRivera-Kahlo social scene. They wed on November 27, 1927; Lusiawas barely twenty. Although the courtship had been filled with ro-mance and passion, Luisa remembered her dreams were dashed ontheir wedding night. In a 1984 interview, she related, “He took meto a horrible hotel . . . my husband said he had business, woman-izing . . . I cried myself to sleep.” Amends must have been made, forwithin months of their wedding, Luisa was pregnant. The couplethen made a decision that would change their lives. They wouldleave their exciting, though sheltered, bohemian community toseek their fortune in New York City. Luisa remarked that she wantedher child to be “a Latin from Manhattan.” On August 28, 1928, theyarrived in New York harbor on the SS Monterey.2

With the Great Depression around the corner, 1928 was not apropitious time for the arrival of a Guatemalan artist and poet. Bythe time their daughter, Mytyl Lorraine, was born in November,they lived in a crowded tenement in Spanish Harlem. AlthoughMiguel and Luisa were fluent in Spanish, French, and English, theyhad difficulty securing employment. Within months of her daugh-ter’s birth, Moreno found herself laboring over a sewing machineand steam press as she struggled to support her infant and unem-ployed husband.

Spanish Harlem would provide the seedbed for her political

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Figure 1. Luisa Moreno (1907–1992). Courtesy Dr. Vicki L. Ruiz.

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3. Interview with Luisa Moreno, Aug. 12–13, 1977, conducted by Albert Camarillo;Moreno interview, 1984. Note: She related two separate instances of rats attacking Latinobabies, one involving the child of a work friend and the other the infant of an unem-ployed Mexican couple.

awakening. Moreno pointed to the event that radicalized her inSpanish Harlem. Although her story could be construed as an apoc-ryphal tale, it encapsulates the hard choices she and other sweatshopworkers had to make in a world with few options. One day whilewalking home from work with a friend, her Latina companion in-vited her to her apartment to see her baby. As they ascended thestairs, they heard a baby cry. Her friend started to panic as she rec-ognized her child’s voice. The apartment was unlocked, with nobabysitter in sight. In the fading sunlight, she carried the infant tothe window. As the light struck the infant’s face, both women staredin horror. A rat had eaten off half the baby’s face. The child died ashort time later. Luisa Moreno called this incident the defining mo-ment of her life. She did not know quite what to do, but she knew shehad to do something to change the material conditions of her fellowworkers. Trade union and political activism became her life course.3

In 1930 Moreno joined the Communist Party (CP). Already ac-tive in Spanish Harlem’s Centro Obrero de Habla Española, a leftist com-munity coalition, Moreno began to mobilize her peers on the shopfloor into La Liga de Costureras, a small-scale garment workers’union. During her days as a “junior organizer,” Moreno would honeher skills at building a grass-roots local. Although La Liga was ini-tially affiliated with the Needle Worker Trades Industrial Union(closely connected to the CP) and later the more mainstream Inter-national Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Moreno waspretty much on her own, receiving little financial help and no staffsupport. As a result, the local remained very small with little orga-nizing clout. However, Moreno endeavored to build a supportivecommunity among the workers. La Liga became a family affair. At atime when only a few male unions had “ladies auxiliaries,” Morenoorganized a “fraternal group,” or male auxiliary, charged with thetask of fundraising. Taking on the traditional women’s work of ticketsales, publicity, and refreshments, fathers, husbands, and brothers ofLiga members organized weekly dances to raise funds for the fledg-ling local. Moreno’s own husband, however, was nowhere in sight.

At this point in his life, Miguel de León had as his constantcompanions his baby, his brushes, and his bottles. A cavalier care-

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4. Moreno interview, 1984; interview with Mytyl Glomboske, Aug. 27, 2001, con-ducted by the author.

giver, he took Mytyl to his favorite neighborhood bar. If he hap-pened to slip away while she napped and she woke up, she quicklylearned what to do. “I remember walking across this huge street andthese huge street cars and having to cross by myself. I had to be care-ful not to get hit by the street car.”4

Moreno’s radicalism was rooted in both conviction and refuge.A newly politicized Marxist and tireless organizer, her whirlwind ofactivism provided physical and psychological distance from a dete-riorating marriage. Rarely home, Moreno had reached a crossroadsby 1935. Although an organizer full-time with the ILGWU, she feltfrustrated that union leaders evinced little interest in Latina work-ers. Moreno had immersed herself in a gamut of leftist politics andin the process struck up a friendship with Gray Bemis, a Nebraskafarm boy turned New York cabbie. Moreno and Bemis, an activistwith the International Workers Order (IWO), attended many of thesame political meetings, and he would often give her rides home.Despite being deeply attracted to him, she hesitated. “I liked him,but he was married and I was married. Although I was in a miserablemarriage, I did not fool around with married men.” When Luisa de-cided to leave New York and accepted a job as an American Federa-tion of Labor (AFL) organizer in Florida, Gray was the one whodrove her and Mytyl to the bus station. (I always wonder what wassaid between them as she boarded the bus.)

Leaving an abusive husband and striking out on her own, LuisaMoreno faced a formidable challenge—to organize Latino, AfricanAmerican, and Italian cigar rollers. The Ku Klux Klan had a reputa-tion for terrorizing labor activists and other progressives, which wasone reason why the AFL was afraid of Florida. While her bosses nodoubt recognized her talent, they also considered her young, green,and expendable. According to Moreno, they believed that the Klanwould think twice before harming a woman organizer. I would fur-ther note that her fair complexion, as well as her gender, affordedher added protection. Slender and under five feet tall, Moreno pos-sessed a delicate beauty, but her physical appearance belied her bril-liance and steely determination.

Her organizing days in Florida signaled the birth of “LuisaMoreno.” Deliberately distancing herself from her past, she chose

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5. Moreno interviews, 1976, 1977, and 1984. This concept of conjugating identitiesderives from interviews with Luisa Moreno and her daughter Mytyl Glomboske, as well asmy reading of the scholarship of Rebecca Lester, Michael Kearney, Chela Sandoval, Stu-art Hall, Paula Moya, and Ramón Gutiérrez. I also owe an enormous intellectual debt toall of my compañeros in the University of California Humanities Research Institute “Re-shaping the Americas” Residency Group (Spring 2002). Moreover, I thank Nancy Hewittfor bringing to my attention the importance of Luisa Capetillo’s organizing in Florida toMoreno’s efforts twenty years later. The quotation is taken from Rebecca J. Lester, Jesús inour Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (Berkeley, forthcoming).

the alias “Moreno” [dark], a name diametrically opposite her givenname “Blanca Rosa” [White Rose]. In the absence of direct testi-mony, her motivations may be teased out with a touch of theoreticalspeculation. Concepts of embodiment, derived from psychoanalytictheories and postmodern imaginaries, hold much promise in bridg-ing or blending ideations of self. Anthropologist Rebecca Lester, forexample, locates the body “as both a locus of experience and an ob-ject of analysis.” I contend that Luisa Moreno conjugated her iden-tity. “Conjugating identities” refers to an invention or inflection ofone’s sense of self, taking into account such constructions as race,class, culture, language, and gender. It represents a self-reflexive,purposeful fluidity of individual subjectivities for political action.Simply put, Moreno made strategic choices regarding her class andethnic identification in order to facilitate her life’s work as a laborand civil rights advocate. With her light skin, education, and un-accented English, she could have “passed”; instead she chose toforego any potential privileges predicated on race, class, or color.Furthermore, she made these changes in the Jim Crow South wheresegregation and white domination were a way of life. The first name“Luisa” could also be seen as a political statement, perhaps a hom-age to Puerto Rican labor organizer and feminist Luisa Capetillo,who had preceded her in Florida twenty years earlier and whoselegacy Moreno undoubtedly knew and built upon in organizing ci-gar workers.5

Rather than emphasizing the primacy of the individual,Moreno focused on the individual in relation to her or his commu-nity: “One person can’t do anything; it’s only with others that thingsare accomplished.” Moreno’s first step was to address worker griev-ances and then later “you try to raise the consciousness of theworker.” “Ask the workers, what are your problems?” She continued,“Work on these minor grievances and address them and go on tomore major ones.” Bread-and-butter issues would always take prece-

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6. Moreno interviews, 1977, 1978. 7. Glomboske interview, 2001; “Handwritten Notes”; Small, Zatz, and Zatz interview,

1996; Moreno interviews, 1977, 1978. For more information on the radicalism of theTampa workers, see Nancy A. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Flor-ida, 1880s–1920s (Urbana, Ill., 2001).

dence over political education, and, as a result, Marxist study groupsthat she initiated were few and far between. By nurturing grass-rootslocals, Moreno cultivated rank-and-file leadership as she fostered asense of communal investment among workers as union members.The local should represent the collective good, not just the interestof one person or a small clique.6 This decentering of self wouldmark her life as an organizer. As a mother, she made painful choicesthat would have long-term consequences for her daughter.

Given her fears about the Klan as well as the challenges and erratic schedules inherent in trade union work, Luisa decided toboard her daughter with a pro-labor Latino family. From age sevenuntil almost thirteen, Mytyl lived with informal foster families; sometreated her well, but others abused her. In Florida, the head ofhousehold routinely molested young Mytyl, while his wife did noth-ing but sob quietly behind Mytyl’s bedroom door. Sixty years later,she related these incidents with rawness and candor, conveying alittle girl’s confusion and pain. Moreno visited infrequently, sendinggreeting cards on occasion. “She never forgot Valentine’s Day,” herdaughter noted. Shuttled from place to place, Mytyl recalled fromchildhood “having the feeling of being alone.” As someone who de-voted herself to trade union and civil rights work, Moreno knew fartoo well the sacrifices people made for their children, and she choseto sacrifice any semblance of family for herself and her daughter.

Although Moreno left the Communist Party in 1935, her com-mitment to Marxism never wavered. Berthe Small recalled the firsttime she met Moreno. As a student at the University of Miami, Smalland her friends piled into a jalopy and puttered across the TamiamiTrail headed for Tampa to watch a labor organizer in action. “Andwe got to the union hall . . . . And I see this beautiful woman de-livering a speech in English, impressive and revolutionary.” Mo-reno’s rhetoric touched a chord among these cigar workers, many of whom, from the days of Luisa Capetillo, had socialist beliefs. Inaddition to the terrorism of the Klan, AFL leaders also feared theradicalism of the workers, but Moreno felt right at home in theircompany.7

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8. Zaragosa Vargas, “Tejana Radical: Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio LaborMovement during the Great Depression,” Pacific Historical Review, 66 (1997).

In Florida Moreno refined her skills as a labor leader. Organiz-ing “all races, creeds, and colors,” she negotiated a solid contractcovering 13,000 cigar workers from Ybor City to Lakeland to Jack-sonville. When AFL officials revised the agreement to be moreamenable to management, an angry Moreno urged the workers toreject it. In response, the AFL transferred her to Pennsylvania.There she mobilized cigar rollers in three states. In 1937 she re-signed from the AFL to join its newly established rival, the Congressof Industrial Organizations (CIO), taking several locals with her. Ayear later, she joined the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing,and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA-CIO). The union’s com-mitment to rank-and-file leadership and to inclusion, recruitingmembers across race, nationality, and gender, resonated withMoreno. She would stay with UCAPAWA for the remainder of hercareer, rising to the position of vice-president in 1941, marking thefirst time a Latina would be elected to a high-ranking nationalunion post. But in 1938 she was a mere UCAPAWA union represen-tative with her first assignment: Move to San Antonio, Texas, to takecharge of the pecan shellers’ strike there. From Pennsylvania, Luisaand Mytyl headed for Texas, but again, they would live apart as Mytylwas boarded with yet another family.

Between 1933 and 1938 Mexican workers had organized apecan shellers’ union in San Antonio. Men, women, and childrenwere paid pitifully low wages—less than $2.00 a week in 1934. Someemployers explained that if they raised the pay scale, Tejanos would“just spend” the extra money on “‘tequila and worthless trinkets inthe dime stores.’” A twenty-three-year-old member of the Workers’Alliance and secretary of the Texas Communist Party, EmmaTenayuca, emerged as the fiery local leader. Although not a pecansheller herself, Tenayuca, a San Antonio native, was elected to headthe strike committee. During the six-week labor dispute, between6,000 and 10,000 strikers faced tear gas and billy clubs “on at leastsix occasions.” Tenayuca courageously organized demonstrations,and she and over 1,000 pecan shellers were jailed. Tenayuca, in aninterview with historian Zaragosa Vargas, reflected on her activism:“I was pretty defiant. [I fought] against poverty, actually starvation,high infant death rates, disease and hunger and misery. I would dothe same thing again.”8

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9. Moreno interviews, 1976, 1978. For more information on UCAPAWA, see Vicki L.Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California FoodProcessing Industry, 1930 –1950 (Albuquerque, 1987); for the pecan shellers’ strike, seeVargas, “Tejana Radical,” and Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women inTwentieth-Century America (New York, 1998).

UCAPAWA president Donald Henderson intervened in thestrike by assigning Luisa Moreno, then a thirty-two-year-old veteranlabor activist, to San Antonio to help solidify the UCAPAWA affiliateand to move from street demonstrations to a functioning tradeunion. As the union’s official representative, Moreno organized thestrikers into a united, disciplined force that employers could nolonger ignore. Five weeks after the strike began, managementagreed to arbitration. The settlement included recognition of theUCAPAWA local and piece rate scales, which complied with the newfederal minimum wage of twenty-five cents an hour. Henderson’sdecision to send Moreno “infuriated” Tenayuca, who reluctantlystepped aside, and the two women had a tenuous and tense workingrelationship.9

Moreno next traveled to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Whileorganizing Mexicano migrants in dire straits, she too had few re-sources. She lived with farm workers, slept under trees, and sharedher groceries with those around her. Moreno encountered what shetermed a “lynch spirit” among rural white residents hostile to Mex-ican workers. She had been in the fields only a short time whenUCAPAWA pulled her out. The drain on union coffers from farm la-bor campaigns in California and Texas prompted the union to focusits energies on the more geographically and financially stable can-nery and packinghouse workers. Before her next assignment,Moreno requested a leave of absence in order to organize a nationalLatino civil rights assembly. After stopping in San Antonio to visitMytyl and pay her board, Luisa headed west. Following an abortiveplanning meeting in Albuquerque, Moreno journeyed to Los Ange-les, where she found sympathetic activists who shared her vision of anational convention, one that would diminish the distance betweencitizens and immigrants and between Mexicanos and Latinos.

Held on April 28–30, 1939, El Congreso de Pueblos de Hablan Española was the first national civil rights assembly for Latinos in theUnited States. The approximately 1,000 to 1,500 delegates, repre-senting over 120 organizations, assembled in Los Angeles to addressissues of jobs, housing, education, health, and immigrant rights.Luisa Moreno drew upon her contacts with Latino labor unions,

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mutual aid societies, and other grass-roots groups in order to en-sure a truly national conference. Although the majority of the dele-gates hailed from California and the Southwest, women and mentraveled from as far away as Montana, Illinois, New York, and Flor-ida to attend the convention. In planning this convention, Morenoworked in tandem with local Los Angeles activists, such as JosefinaFierro, Eduardo Quevedo, and Bert Corona, who also assumedleadership roles in El Congreso. The conference attracted a diversegroup of delegates—teenagers, teachers, labor leaders, and even afew politicians.

Over the course of three days, Congreso delegates drafted acomprehensive platform. They called for an end to segregation inpublic facilities, housing, education, and employment, as well as todiscrimination in the disbursement of public assistance. El Congresoendorsed the rights of immigrants to live and work in the UnitedStates without fear of deportation. While encouraging immigrantsto become citizens, delegates did not advocate assimilation butrather emphasized the importance of preserving Latino cultures,and they called upon universities to create departments in LatinoStudies. Despite the promise of the first convention, a national net-work of local branches never developed, and red-baiting would latertake its toll among fledgling chapters in California.

El Congreso brought together Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro,women whose life-long friendship was forged in the fire of commu-nity organizing. A native of Mexicali, Josefina Fierro was descendedfrom a line of rebellious women. Her grandmother and motherwere Magónistas, followers of socialist leader Juan Flores Magón.While a student at UCLA, Josefina Fierro met Hollywood writerJohn Bright at the local cabaret where her tia sang. After their mar-riage, she became a community organizer in East Los Angeles anddrew upon her celebrity connections to raise funds for barriocauses. While Luisa Moreno took the lead in organizing the 1939national meeting of El Congreso, Josefina Fierro proved instrumentalin buoying the day-to-day operations of the fragile Southern Cali-fornia chapters. Both Moreno and Fierro believed in the dignity ofthe common person and the importance of grass-roots networks,reciprocity, and self-help. As Fierro commented in an interview with historian Mario García, “Movie stars such as Anthony Quinn,Dolores Del Rio, and John Wayne contributed money, ‘not becausethey were reds, . . . but because they were helping Mexicans helpthemselves.’” The two women also shared an awareness of the posi-

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10. Moreno interviews, 1977, 1978; interview with Josefina Fierro de Bright, Aug. 7,1977, conducted by Albert Camarillo; Carlos C. Larralde and Richard Griswold delCastillo, “Luisa Moreno: A Hispanic Civil Rights Leader in San Diego,” Journal of San DiegoHistory, 14 (1995), 284 –310. For more information on El Congreso, see David G. Gutiér-rez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity inthe Southwest, 1910 –1986 (Berkeley, 1995); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican America:Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Los Angeles, 1900 –1945 (New York, 1993); Albert Camar-illo, Chicanos in California (San Francisco, 1984); Mario García, Mexican Americans: Lead-ership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930 –1960 (New Haven, Conn., 1981); Rodolfo Acuña, Occu-pied America: A History of Chicanos (New York, 2000).

11. The corrido is from “Cifras y Datos,” Escuela de Obreros Betabeleros Abril de1940, Denver, Colorado (UCAPAWA publication, 1940), 14 –15.

tionality of women in U.S. Latino communities. The southern Cali-fornia chapters of El Congreso created a woman’s committee and awoman’s platform, a platform that expressly recognized the “doublediscrimination” facing Mexican women. In the words of JosefinaFierro: “We had women’s problems that were very deep . . . discrim-ination in jobs . . . migratory problems . . . schooling. No, we didn’thave a Lib Movement so we didn’t think in terms of what women’sroles were—we just did it and it worked.”10

After the national convention, Moreno returned to UCAPAWAand, with a grant from the liberal Garland Fund, organized a laborschool for Colorado beet workers in Denver. In addition to classesin Mexican and labor history, Moreno taught the fine arts of nego-tiating contracts, writing pamphlets, and operating mimeographmachines. Margarito Cárdenas, a student at the school, composed acorrido honoring UCAPAWA and Moreno. Two stanzas with theoriginal stanzas om Spanish are as follows:

Con muy grande sacrificio With great sacrificeY empeño del CIO And perseverance of the CIOLa compañera Moreno Sister Luisa MorenoEsta escuela organizó. Organized this school.

Fijemonos en lo pasado Let us us take heed of the pastComprendamos la razón And understand reason.Divididos no hay progreso Divided there’s no progressSolamente con la Unión. Only through the Union.11

After several months in Colorado, Moreno made an unex-pected move, accepting a desk job with the national office in Wash-ington, D.C., as the editor of Noticias de UCAPAWA, the Spanish-language version of UCAPAWA News. I contend that she took thispost in an attempt to establish a relationship with her daughter, now

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12. Moreno interviews, 1976, 1977, 1979; Glomboske interview, 2001.

almost a teenager. With great fondness, Mytyl recalled Christmas in Maryland (1940), their first holiday together in five years: “I re-member having a gift under the tree . . . . I didn’t care whether theother kids had five gifts . . . . I was tickled that I had one gift underthe tree.”12

The next Christmas would find the duo in Los Angeles. Anx-ious to return to the field, Moreno lobbied for a new assignment—to consolidate union organizing among southern California can-nery workers, many of whom were Mexican and Jewish women.Moreno, as the newly elected union vice-president, threw herselfinto this task, earning the nickname “The California Whirlwind.”Capitalizing on the gendered networks on the shop floor, Morenowould harvest unparalleled success, as food-processing operativesunder the UCAPAWA banner significantly improved their workingconditions, wages, and benefits.

The California canning labor force included young daughters,newlyweds, middle-aged wives, and widows. Occasionally three gen-erations—daughter, mother, and grandmother—worked togetherat a particular cannery. Entering the job market as members of afamily wage economy, they pooled their resources to put food on thetable. “My father was a busboy,” Carmen Bernal Escobar recalled,“and to keep the family going . . . in order to bring in a little moremoney . . . my mother, my grandmother, my mother’s brother, mysister and I all worked together at Cal San.” One of the largest can-neries in Los Angeles, the California Sanitary Canning Company(Cal San) employed primarily Mexican and Russian Jewish women.They were clustered in specific departments—washing, grading,cutting, canning, and packing—and paid according to the produc-tion level. Women jockeyed for position near the chutes or gateswhere the produce was plentiful. “Those at the end of the linehardly made nothing,” Escobar recalled. Standing in the same spotsweek after week, month after month, women workers often devel-oped friendships crossing family and ethnic lines. Their day-to-dayproblems (slippery floors, irritating peach fuzz, production speed-ups, arbitrary supervisors, and sexual harassment) cemented feel-ings of solidarity. Cannery workers even employed a special jargonwhen conversing among themselves, often referring to an event in

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terms of when specific fruits or vegetables arrived for processing atthe plant. For instance, the phrase, “We met in spinach, fell in lovein peaches, and married in tomatoes” indicates that a couple met inMarch, fell in love in August, and married in October.

In 1939 Cal San employees staged a dramatic strike led byUCAPAWA organizer Dorothy Ray Healey. Wages and conditionsimproved at the plant as workers nurtured their local and jealouslyguarded their closed shop contract. When Luisa Moreno arrived,she enlisted the aid of union members at California Walnut and CalSan in union drives at several Los Angeles-area food-processingfirms. Workers organized other workers across canneries, ethnici-ties, generations, and gender, informing their colleagues at otherplants of the benefits and improved wages that they had won underUCAPAWA representation. News traveled across friend and kin net-works and in several languages, but predominantly in English andSpanish. The result would be Local 3, the second-largest UCAPAWAaffiliate in the nation. Moreno encouraged cross-plant alliances andwomen’s leadership. In 1943, for example, women filled twelve ofthe fifteen elected positions of the local, and Mexican women wereelected to eight of these posts. The union members proved able ne-gotiators during annual contract renewals. In addition to higherwages and better conditions, the local also provided benefits thatfew industrial unions could match—free legal advice and a hospi-talization plan.

Moreno also extended the union’s reach beyond Los Angeles toorganizing food-processing operatives in Fullerton, Riverside, Red-lands, Santa Ana, San Diego, and the San Joaquin Valley. Local 2represented the largest cannery in California, Val Vita of Fullerton,a facility unmatched in deplorable conditions. Company supervisorsthere were notorious for exploiting line personnel, 75 percent ofwhom were Mexican. Women frequently fainted from exhaustionduring speed-up periods. Day care was also a major concern, sincemany employees had no alternative but to leave their small childrenlocked inside their automobiles in the plant parking lot. Moreno leda hard-fought campaign that resulted not only in a resounding vic-tory, complete with certification by the National Labor RelationsBoard (NLRB), but also in higher wages, more humane conditions,and management-financed, on-site day care. By the following year(1943), UCAPAWA members had won thirty-one NLRB elections:seventeen in San Joaquin Valley packinghouses, thirteen more in

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13. This discussion is taken from Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows, 80– 82, and Ruiz,Cannery Women, 69– 85.

Riverside-Redlands, and one in a Santa Ana onion dehydrationplant.

In southern California, UCAPAWA provided women canneryworkers with the crucial “social space” necessary to assert their in-dependence and display their talents. They were not rote employ-ees, numbed by repetition, but women with dreams, goals, tenacity,and intellect. In addition to extensive committee service, Mexicanwomen in southern California locals held more than 40 percent ofexecutive board and shop steward positions. A fierce loyalty to theunion developed as the result of rank-and-file participation andleadership. Four decades after the strike, Carmen Bernal Escobardeclared, “UCAPAWA was the greatest thing that ever happened tothe workers at Cal San. It changed everything and everybody.”13

In tandem with these union victories, Moreno rose in the ranksof the California CIO, becoming the first Latina to serve on a stateCIO council. Her greatest professional challenge began in August1945, as the union launched a campaign among food-processingworkers in northern California. A year earlier UCAPAWA hadchanged its name to the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and AlliedWorkers of America (with the mercifully short acronym FTA), andthe union, now the seventh-largest CIO affiliate, girded itself for ajurisdictional battle with the International Brotherhood of Team-sters. In May 1945 the AFL national president turned over its north-ern California cannery unions to the Teamsters; as a result, disgrun-tled local leaders approached FTA. Directing an ambitious drivethat extended from San José to Sacramento to Modesto, Morenohandpicked her organizing team, including both veteran activistslike John Tisa from New Jersey and new recruits from the rank andfile, such as Lorena Ballard, an “Okie” packinghouse worker. Withinthree months, the team had collected 14,000 union pledge cardsand helped to establish twenty-five functioning locals. Winning theNLRB election covering seventy-two plants, FTA, under Moreno’sleadership, seemed poised to replicate the successes of FTA mem-bers to the south. For example, at Pacific Grape Products in Mo-desto, “one of the largest independent canneries in California,” em-ployees negotiated a path-breaking agreement that included aclosed shop, higher wages, overtime, and sick leave.

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14. Carey McWilliams, “Luisa Moreno Bemis” (Aug, 1949), file 53, Kenny Collec-tion; “Data on Luisa Moreno Bemis”; “Handwritten Notes”; Glomboske interview, 2001;Moreno interview, 1984.

Moreno’s professional success masked personal turmoil.Shortly after her arrival in Los Angeles in 1941, Moreno met andmarried Jacob Shaffer, a local dry cleaner, but thirteen-year-oldMytyl, so recently reunited with her mother, was in no mood for a stepfather. “I wanted my mother all to myself,” she explained: “She was nobody else’s. She was mine.” Although both Luisa andMytyl characterized Jacob as a “nice guy,” Mytyl and her stepfather“couldn’t get along.” Unable to resolve this friction, Moreno sepa-rated from her husband within three months of their marriage.

Mytyl continued to test her boundaries, and her teenage yearswere marked by rebellion. Recalling her habit of ditching classes atManual Arts High School, Mytyl candidly revealed: “We used to getthe sailors to go into the liquor stores to buy us some booze. Thenwe’d go into the alley and drink.” Mytyl also enjoyed correspond-ing with servicemen as a “pen pal.” “I had boyfriends in the navy;boyfriends in the army.” Luisa Moreno was working behind thescenes raising money from union locals for the legal defense of agroup of Mexican American youth unjustly convicted in the SleepyLagoon murder case; these young men were characterized by thepress as dangerous, zoot suit-wearing pachucos. Imagine Moreno’ssurprise when she caught Mytyl dressed to the nines as a pachuca. Ac-cording to Mytyl: “One time I came home with a dress that was shortlike a pachuca, [the skirt] came straight down [and tight]. And she[her mother] took the scissors and that was the end of that dress.”The two would continue to bicker, and Mytyl, just shy of her seven-teenth birthday in 1945, eloped with returning veteran EdwardGlomboske, the older brother of a girlfriend. During one of our in-terviews, Moreno remarked, “I had a choice. I could organize can-nery workers or I could control my teenage daughter. I chose to or-ganize cannery workers and my daughter never forgave me.”14

In the midst of Mytyl’s sudden marriage and the northern Cali-fornia organizing drive, Moreno would rediscover romance in herown life. Living in San Francisco and absorbed in the logistics of thecannery campaign, Luisa had not planned on attending the CIO V-J Day dance to celebrate the end of the war, but her union com-pañera Elizabeth Sasuly had goaded her to have “a little fun.” At the

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15. Ruiz, Cannery Women, 103 –107; Moreno interview, 1984; Zatz/Small interview,1996; Glomboske interview, 2001; Robert W. Kenny to Luisa Bemis, Feb. 11, 1950, file 56,Kenny Collection. Given the fact that Gray Bemis was politically active in southern Cali-fornia before he joined the navy, I surmise that he and Luisa had probably crossed pathsearlier, but in her memories, Luisa remembered the CIO dance as the signifying momentof their courtship.

dance she noticed a handsome naval officer who looked hauntinglyfamiliar. He was Gray Bemis. They danced, and while on the floor,Luisa summoned up the courage to inquire, “How’s your wife?” Hestopped to take out an envelope from his pocket—it held his di-vorce papers. Gray and Luisa married seventeen months later. Manywho knew the couple commented on their great love for one an-other. In Mytyl’s words: “I remember loving him very much and Icould just feel the tremendous love he had for my mother . . . tak-ing care of her, surrounding her with love.” As her attorney andfriend Robert Kenny wrote in a letter to Luisa after Gray’s death in 1960, “Certainly the story of your marriage and devotion is a love story that most novelists would want to claim as their own creation.”15

The autumn of 1945 held out much promise for Moreno per-sonally and professionally; however, the northern California can-nery campaign was far from finished, despite winning an NLRBelection that included seventy-two plants. In February 1946 theNLRB, under intense political pressure, rescinded the results of the1945 election and called for a second tabulation. The Teamsters im-mediately negotiated sweetheart contracts with many northern Cali-fornia firms, contracts stipulating membership in the Teamsters as acondition for employment. Pro-FTA workers lost their jobs, andTeamster goons physically assaulted FTA organizers as well as rank-and-file members. At the Libby plant in Sacramento, many Euro-pean American and Mexican women were locked out after refusingto pay Teamster dues. In protest, they set up picket lines outsideLibby’s, and on May 7, as they held hands and sang the “Star Span-gled Banner,” they were assaulted by Seafarer Union and Teamsterthugs armed with brass knuckles and other weapons. Scabs, re-cruited from a local bartenders’ union, were so sickened by thespectacle that they refused to enter the cannery.

The sweetheart contracts, rampant red-baiting, and Teamsterterror sealed FTA’s defeat. Amazingly, Moreno and her team lost byfewer than 2,000 votes in the second election. The Teamster victory

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marked the beginning of the end for FTA in California and nation-wide. The union would become a battered target of conservativepoliticians and rival labor leaders, and by 1950 the union could nolonger withstand the barrage of red-baiting that was part and parcelof Cold War politics. Indeed, to combat charges of communists intheir midst, the CIO national leadership would purge ten unions foralleged communist domination, FTA among them. FTA repre-sented a grass-roots democratic union where local members exer-cised real power in running their local and an alternative to what developed in many mainstream unions during the Cold War, a phi-losophy of business unionism where professional staff, rather thanthe workers, ran the affairs of the local and whose interests often co-incided with those of management.

In 1947 Luisa Moreno retired from public life. She and Graysettled in San Diego where he was a manager for a plumbing firm,and she became a homemaker and amateur photographer. How-ever, a year later she faced deportation proceedings. According toMoreno, she was offered citizenship in exchange for testifyingagainst legendary Longshoremen union leader Harry Bridges, butshe refused to become a “free woman with a mortgaged soul.” Al-though high-profile journalists Carey McWilliams and IgnacioLópez chaired her defense committee and put forth a valiant effort,the result was almost a foregone conclusion. With Gray Bemis at herside, she left the United States in 1950, under terms listed as “vol-untary departure under warrant of deportation,” on the groundsthat she had once belonged to the Communist Party. She died in hernative Guatemala on November 4, 1992.

Like Luisa Capetillo decades earlier, Luisa Moreno believed inthe dignity of working people and the rights of immigrants. Shelived an extraordinary life, from pampered rich girl to bohemianartist in Mexico to an American civil rights and labor leader. Shehad a national presence in trade union circles, but her role has beenlargely erased. She represents a rich history of labor activism amongLatinos and Latinas. Reconciling with her mother, Mytyl became an activist in her own right. For two decades in Los Angeles until her death in 2002, Mytyl Glomboske became a fixture in a mosaic of social justice causes, including the United Farm Workers, animalrights, environmental advocacy, dignity for AIDS patients, and theBus Riders’ Union (to name just a few). Mytyl always couched herown tireless activism as a tribute to her mother.

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In preparing for the INS hearings, Luisa Moreno clearly artic-ulated her own legacy. “They can talk about deporting me . . . butthey can never deport the people that I’ve worked with and withwhom things were accomplished for the benefit of hundreds ofthousands of workers—things that can never be destroyed.”16

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16. Ruiz, Cannery Women, 113 –118; “The Case of Luisa Moreno Bemis,” Labor Com-mittee for Luisa Moreno Bemis pamphlet (in author’s possession); U.S. Department ofJustice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, “Closing INS Report (Los Angeles Dis-trict) on Luisa Moreno” Dec. 6, 1950; Steve Murdoch, Our Times, Sept. 9, 1949, file 53,Kenny Papers.

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